Turns out, it’s a little of both – a public art venture about neighbourhood markings funded through Olympic dollars granted to the city for the arts.  And I suppose, if something had to come from dirty money, this is almost as good as it gets in terms of a “line in the sand” between us and them.

This piece by Ken Lum is the artist’s homage to his neighbourhood, to what we locals call ‘the republic of east van’, to the place and people this little blog celebrates. At some 60 feet high Lum’s East Van cross sits near the corner of Clark Drive and Great Northern Way, marking the spot where Vancouver’s major trucking route cuts between this fast-gentrifying neighbourhood (once and still belonging to immigrants and labourers) and the Finning Lands – a long-time industrial wasteland being re-made as a multi-institutional post-secondary campus. It’s generated a lot of buzz, this cross.

It’s significance is in being there at all. Marking the neighbourhood as definable to those those who continue to claim its rough edges  despite gentrification. It’s a message about the way seemingly-marginal words and symbols come to imbue and be imbued by large meanings. How networks of people generate and circulate symbols, and how those things take on new meanings over time, are amplifications of the squabbles that exist as symbols are claimed by different groups of people for different reasons. It’s all very Society of the Spectacle on the one hand. A testament to the role of the symbol in helping to reconstitute and re-energize resistance on the other.

As the artist himself says in his statement about the piece: “[The crossword] signifies the identity of those living in the eastern part of the city and is often accompanied with the word “rules”. [This] is ironic, as traditionally those in the west of the city have held the economic and political power, though the real estate boom more recently has rendered the boundary between east and west more fluid. The piece monumentalizes a rearguard gesture of defiance, protest, and assertion of identity.”

The East Van cross. A fierce marker, symbol of gangs, an indication of pride and identity, a warning of all that was dangerous about my ‘hood. For those of us who lived here before the turn-of-the-century-homes were bulldozed for condos, before housing prices skyrocketed across the city, bringing folks who would otherwise have settled elsewhere onto this side of town to renovate old homes and open coffee shops for their morning lattes, before all that was (and still is) vibrant and real and diverse about this community became so much kitsch to be packaged, branded, and sold to folks with disposable incomes and a fascination with the ways people’s struggles against poverty, colonialism, and the cops could be re-branded a sale-able ‘cool’. The East Van cross. Staring from boutique windows across the neighbourhood on $20 coffee mugs, $35 t-shirts, $75 hoodies, even $200 dollar sneakers.  It’s all that and more.

(The official City of Vancouver page on the piece includes a nifty little video with some old east van footage as well as the artist talking about the work).

]]> http://viaducteast.ca/2010/06/02/crossing-east-van/feed/ 0 resistrantrelax eastvancrossatnight2 http://viaducteast.ca/2010/05/18/defend-grandview-park-from-the-people/ http://viaducteast.ca/2010/05/18/defend-grandview-park-from-the-people/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 22:56:03 +0000 Megan Eliza http://viaducteast.ca/?p=129 ]]>

Only on Commercial Drive could a community park redevelopment engender the creation of three different ad-hoc “groups”. The issue? The redevelopment of Grandview Park, one of a number of East Vancouver parks slated for a facelift over the past few years. Like other redevelopment projects (Victory Square, Oppenheimer Park, Victoria Park), there is a shut-down period of approximately eight months scheduled in which to complete the work (July until March) during which time local residents will have to content themselves with Victoria, Strathcona, or Mosaic Parks, all in the immediate vicinity. From what I can tell from the park plan the intention is to:

• re-do the children’s play area and water park
• tear down the rotten tennis court that is rarely used as a tennis court and replace it with a multi-use court that apparently will allow bike polo (this was not on the original plan, but has been added following community consultation)
• improve street visibility of the park to “cut down on crime” (I have to note here that since my first visit to the park twenty years ago there have been no less than three improvements to visibility in the park for exactly this reason).
• increased seating – benches and picnic tables (most of which were removed from the park about a decade ago in order to reduce loitering and “crime”)
• improve park drainage (which they have tried to do on more than one occasion)

All pretty standard stuff right? I mean, cities redevelop parks all the time with many of these same objectives – including the one about reducing the amount of drugs flowing through a given neighbourhood – and people don’t pitch huge fits. But not in East Van.

The three “groups” in order of formation are:

• Friends of Grandview Park – A repugnant little group of homeowners who seem to think that their use of the park should trump everyone else’s. These were the same people who campaigned to get the Community Policing Center into the park (hotly protested at the time), and mostly they resent the fact they paid top-dollar to purchase a home close to a comunity park without checking into the fact that houses bordering parks are always subject to a higher property crime rate. Doesn’t matter what part of the city – this is just how it works (not unlike being within a kilometer of a skytrain). These folks belong in the suburbs but don’t want to admit it. This is not so much a group as an adhoc collection of angry neighbours to the park.
• Defenders of Grandview Park – An equally annoying little group of people who apparently don’t know the history of the park and its many redevelopments. One of the group founders posted yesterday on the Facebook page that he doesn’t care about the specifics of park redevelopment, hasn’t been to any consultations about the park, and doesn’t see this as at all an issue because he is willing to do property damage in protest of the changes he knows nothing about. Specifically he is angry that the park will be closed for eight months and while he won’t burn down people’s homes, he doesn’t stop short of burning tires. (No, I’m not making this up, you can read that particular thread here). On Saturday night they called a demonstration that sounded pretty cool (public party/dancing in the park etc.) until they ended the night by smashing up the parole office and lighting some sort of a fire in the middle of the street while police watched them.
• The People’s Front of Grandview – Which is anti-black block but pro-social and stands by a park for everyone. This appears to be two people with a Facebook group at the moment but seems to capture more of the generalist sentiment in the neighbourhood. Very few people ally with the angry homeowners, but probably even fewer are on side with the bottle-throwing kids. I’m not sure what the motivation is here though except to be a counterpoint to both of the original groups.

As someone who has lived directly across from both Victoria and Grandview Parks for several years (as a renter both times – now I own in Hastings Sunrise) I’m guessing people generally like the idea of some improvements to the park, aren’t happy about it being closed down for eight months, and while they don’t mind the pot dealers, they would rather see the crack dealers go elsewhere. (And no, please do not tell me the drug dealers in the park are only selling weed because I’ve observed othewise. On the other hand, it’s some pretty low-profile drug dealing and mostly people ignore it). The notion that the park has somehow gone downhill in the last five years (as claimed by the FOG) is ridiculous given that when I first hung out in that park twenty years ago the city was fretting about the crime problem in the park and homeless kids regularly slept there (I know this because I was one of them). On the other hand to claim that all park redevelopment is only about attacking homeless people is to apply conspiracy logic to the very standard city practice of updating city facilities.

At the heart of all this handwringing is of course a debate on gentrification – and the anti-park redevelopment crowd are right when they point to the effects of this trend around the area on rents, policing levels, and food prices (all higher as the median income in the neighbourhood has risen over the past two decades). And they are also right when they point out that the east end has over time become less accessible, giving low income people in the city little choice over housing location and cost. Following on a combination of government policy that slashed funding for all form of non-market housing (social and co-operative housing among them) and a real estate “boom” that drove prices through the roof faster than a new york minute — not to mention the loss of profit imperative in building apartment buildings when condos were so much more lucrative (check it out, no new apartment buildings have been erected since the 1970s) – Vancouver renters with and without jobs have been stuck with increasing bills and no way to pay them. Where exactly are people supposed to go?

For a long time, even as other parts of the city erupted in the economic frenzy, the Drive continued to provide a mix of liveability with affordability that made for an important refuge – and Grandview Park is the symbollic heart of of all that goes on there. So it makes sense that what happens is going to be a touchy issue. But unfortunately, the people making the most noise about it are probably the least representative of the community at large, and for the most part are totally missing some pretty key things:

• Park redevelopment and beautification projects generally follow gentrification, they don’t spark it. Homes sell for over a million dollars around the Drive, rents close to the park are as much as $1700 for a decent 2-bedroom. Park redevelopment is a drop in the bucket compared to all the other upward pressures on housing prices in the neighbourhood.
• Park redevelopment isn’t a really great strategy for gentrification in any case. As soon as Victory and Victoria Parks were finished the original park users (including families, folks drinking beer and people who slept in the parks) all returned. It’s one thing to do the work, but if FOG and others think that’s going to dictate how people use the park then they better be prepared for a rude awakening within two days of the construction fence coming down.
• This is not the first redevelopment, nor is it the first time the park has been at least partially shut down in the twenty years I’ve been familar with Grandview. It is unfortunate the renos are so extensive as to require a whole-park closure, but we are talking jackhammering out concrete structures and regrading the whole thing. I fail to see how this would be done in stages.
• I know on the anti-side it really bugs folks that the FOG have raised drugs as an issue over and over again, but let’s be clear – most people don’t want crack dealers in their neighbourhood. Really. Doesn’t matter how anti-prohibition they are. You’re not speaking “for the people” to defend those who deal in death.
• Consultations are aimed at bringing people onside. I noticed a commenter on the DOG Facebook page sneering that the bike polo people had gone on side with the renos once the city had heard their needs and addressed them, calling it “divide and conquer”. I would actually call it “effective and meaningful community consultation”. In fact it’s downright remarkable that the city actually listened to a group of about sixty people who wanted a structure for their specific purpose – and then designed a park around that. And finally,
• As much as they would like to claim it (and as much as DOG would like to blame them for it) Friends of Grandview Park were not responsible for getting funding earmarked for the park. The funding was set aside for Grandview and a number of other projects by the NPA when they were in office and we are coming to the culmination of that particular round of park upgrades. It’s really normal for cities to upgrade their facilities and after this city has collected on the economic boom in the form of increased property taxes we should damn well expect a few nicer things like a park that doesn’t slough off all its grass every rainy season.

Are there things I’m unhappy about in this process? Yes, of course. Like, for example, we are losing the little stage we’ve been holding protests in front of forever. And I hate the idea of going one summer without Grandview Park being open for lolling about in. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we can keep holding “illegal protests” without the stage, and Trout Lake is really much nicer on a hot day anyways. I don’t expect that every one of my needs will be met through a community consultative process and no one should – that’s the whole point of consultation. And no, I’m not denying that some people have more prominent voices in our society than others (and I am tired of the FOG-types in all our east end neighbourhoods), which is the struggle we need to keep having, but to suggest that burning plastic garbage (ie: tires) is an effective response to community consultations that don’t go your own way (and which you didn’t attend) seems devoid of any analysis about what it is that makes a community in the first place.

It’s the WISE Club, and I’ve been coming here since the early 1990s when I discovered the spot after a folk music show in the upstairs hall. Meg’s been dropping in since she moved to the city in the mid-1990s. And though no doubt on countless occasions we’ve been at different tables here, engaged in different debates about exactly the same kinds of things, it’s only in this last couple of years that we’ve come together, the spot that was each of ours now the spot that is both of ours. Drinking-hole. Dank basement. Gathering place of communists, anarchists, writers, musicians, ne’er-do-wells, students, folkies and local drunks – and we’ve been all of these at various times in this place. It’s the WISE. It’s exactly what we want. But it sure as hell ain’t what it started out to be.

In 1957, Peggy Campbell, a Brit now living in Canada, contacted a Vancouver radio station with her name and information, hoping that she might track down others recently-immigrated from the UK for some social time and reminiscences of home. Responses came in, a little group was formed, and at Lochdale Hall on February 28, 1958, the WISE Club was officially founded. Taking its name from the acronym for Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English, the club based itself around regular gatherings for cards, darts, billiards and the like.

Throughout the 1960s the Club grew, its membership at one point reaching 1000. And its activities grew, too, with a choir, fitness classes, group trips to the UK, and a soccer team being added to the roster of offerings. But what the WISE didn’t have was a home, instead bouncing among various halls for specific gatherings and events.

It was in 1963 that the WISE Social and Athletic Club formed a building committee and sought a home of its own, eventually settling on an old church at 1882 Adanac, just west of Victoria Drive. Bought for $14,000, the building allowed the development of a hall for Club events and outside rentals atop a lounge/ bar in the basement, closed to the public and allowing members a space to drop in for drinks, conversation, cards and darts. But just as some permanence was found for location, just as the WISE transformed from an event-based gathering to a place on the map, its membership went through a massive transformation, dramatically changing the character of the Club.

The original clientele began to move out of town, move into retirement, and membership declined to as low as 20 people. But when a group of folk music buffs – The Rogue Folk Club – partnered up with the WISE in the 1980s, it underwent a re-birth, becoming home to a wide assortment of East Van locals who moved through folk music, protest movement and radical labour circles. The darts remained. The billiards remained. But the character of the place was transformed, as the WISE came by accident to play a central role in building and sustaining a particular East Van working class and activist subculture.

Today, over 50 years after its founding, the WISE remains unique among Vancouver pubs and clubs. The bar is still home to the radicals, and has also attracted a significant cluster of artists, writers, musicians. Tonight, as we still here with our beers sharing a bag of potato chips, there are only occasional stomps from the hall upstairs – no band playing tonight, but instead the monthly gathering of kinksters for a BDSM party. Tonight,some friends from another circle have discovered the place for he first time – he a playwright, she a writer of short stories and poetry – and sit talking wine and writing with a group of former co-workers. Tonight, some dozen activists cycle to and from our table to reflect on and celebrate the anti-Olympics protest we’ve just returned from.

You can’t just walk into the WISE. Members only, guests to be signed in, and show up more than a couple of times and folks’ll start getting on you to buy a membership. But we like it this way. It’s kinda nice to have a place that is exclusively ours, a bar for all those who would otherwise have no neighbourhood bar to take them. A radical, writerly, dark-side of Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

I wouldn’t join any Club that would have me as a member, Groucho joked. Evidently, he didn’t have the WISE.

Vancouver Public Library Press Release: New Location for Downtown Eastside-Strathcona Branch

(Vancouver, British Columbia) – The City of Vancouver has purchased a new site for the future Downtown Eastside-Strathcona Library Branch, bringing one step closer the Library Board’s long-time vision for a full service library in the historic city centre to complement the Carnegie Reading Room.

The Downtown Eastside-Strathcona Branch, which will also provide library service to Chinatown, will be located at 720-730 East Hastings Street on the south side between Heatley Avenue and Hawks Avenue.

“This is truly a dream come true,” said Vancouver Public Library Board Chair Joan Andersen. “Providing full library service to these diverse neighbourhoods, some of which face significant economic and social challenges, has been a longstanding goal of the Vancouver Public Library Board of Trustees. We are delighted to announce that we are closer to making the branch a reality.”

The Library Board will request capital funding from the City for the design process, which is expected to begin this year. In the short term the Library will explore partnership opportunities for the development. The Board has contracted McClanaghan and Associates to consult with neighbourhoods to refine the vision for the library branch. This community input will help inform the library’s development plan.

“People in the community have told us that expanded collections of books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, Internet computer access and community meeting space as well as programs for children, teens, adults and seniors are priorities for the full service library. The Board is committed to again consulting with the community to ensure we can best deliver the desired collections and services and reflect the cultural and creative vitality of the neighbourhoods,” Andersen said.

The City of Vancouver had earlier acquired the Heatley Block, located on Hastings Street at Heatley Avenue, as the location for the library branch. After hearing from the community, however, the Library Board determined that an alternate site would be preferable.

Founded in 1887, Vancouver Public Library is one of Canada’s largest library systems dedicated to meeting the lifelong learning, reading, recreation and information needs of the people of Vancouver. Each year, the Library’s 22 branches serve over six million visitors and offer over 2.5 million items, including books, CDs, DVDs, magazines and countless online resources.

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Following in the track of its successful bike-lane trial on the Burrard Street Bridge, the city is now considering a dedicated bicycle lane on the Dunsmuir Viaduct.

The two-way bike lane, which would be separated from traffic by concrete barriers, would create a strong East-West connection between the downtown and the heavily used Adanac Street bikeway to East Vancouver, said Vision Vancouver Coun. Geoff Meggs.

The beauty of the plan, he added, is that it doesn’t negatively impact motorists.

One of the viaduct’s three traffic lanes was cordoned off several years ago to facilitate the construction of the Spectrum/Costco development near GM Place.

The staff recommendation, which comes before council Thursday, would see existing concrete barriers shifted to the viaduct’s northernmost lane from the southernmost lane —maintaining two traffic lanes into downtown. The cost of the project is $300,000.

The proposed configuration would result in a separated, four-metre-wide, bike-only lane as well as two narrow traffic lanes heading into downtown. The existing sidewalk would be unchanged.

The staff report is also looking at something that could have a large impact on traffic — how to implement separated bike lanes in the downtown peninsula.

Meggs warned that there are no easy answers downtown as separated bicycle lanes would have to come at the expense of parking spots or traffic lanes.

Two shots of a three-block series on the corner of Hastings and Kamloops which document the not-so-distant past of a neighbourhood that creeks flowed through and where people kept bees as part of their backyard agriculture. Continued work around the Hastings Park Conservancy and guidelines adopted to re-allow urban beekeeping in Vancouver in 2005 are part of bringing back to life the natural features that helped make Hastings-Sunrise such a liveable part of the city. Although the Hastings corridor itself is a tad shabby in spots, the surrounding neighbourhood is full of beautiful and productive gardens, fruit trees, and the occasional coop of illegal chickens.

I’ve lived in East Van most of my life, but in 1990, as I approached the end of my high school days, the family moved from the southeast corrner of the city, round the Knight Street Bridge area, to East Georgia Street, on the eastern edge of the Downtown Eastside. It was an old house, the quintessential run-down Vancouver “character home”, three levels on a narrrow lot, solid wood construction that had been covered over many many years past with asbestos shingles. The home sat directly across the street from Seymour Elementary School, and it sits there still – though my folks have moved on, I have moved on, and the 100 year old cedar that shaded the front yard for so long has sadly been taken down.

I bought the home from my parents in 2003, and lived there 4 years before selling it. During that time, I was intrigued by the constant discoveries in the place – truancy notices from 1913, stuck all these years in a heating vent; newspapers from the neighbourhood going back decades, used as an under-layer for wallpaper that had since been painted over numerous times; broken tools and nails and pots and pans found in the garden or in the way of a new track of pipe.

So, in 2006, I finally took the plunge and got a local home researcher to search the records, place the home in the broader context of the neighbourhood and the city, and generally see what he could find out about my little place. James had done a number of these projects, and has a neat site for Vancouver house histories, and he went to work right away, returning just a couple of months later with a little booklet on Vancouver, the East Side, Strathcona, and the house on Georgia I called home.

And the history? Nothing remarkable, nothing newsworthy, nothing shocking. But important, nonetheless, and it certianly did not disappoint, giving me a greater sense of history and place, and the place in history of all the countless houses like mine-at-the-time that dot East Vancouver.

In 1905, construction started on this little street then called Harris – the name East Georgia would only come a decade later, with the building of the first Georgia Viaduct to link the eastside with the downtown core. The house was put up by Charles White Elliot, a ships’ carpenter originally from Nova Scotia, and to this day you can see his maritime professional interest represented in little features like the unique, sea-inspired carving of the home’s bannister and stairwell.

It was a pretty good location at the time. Close to the major work-sites, docks and canneries and railway yards. Seymour School stood across the street. And the year the home was completed, 1906, the City initiated streetcar service along Harris – its cobbles and tracks no longer visible on that stretch of what is now Georgia Street, but at numerous other points in the neighbourhood. So the house had no trouble selling, and over the next years it changed hands a whole bunch of times, this working class district housing a signficant transient population as folks moved in, moved out, moved up and down in search of work and community.

Charles and his wife, Mary, stayed just two years. The next two it housed Max Grossman, a jeweller and clothier. Then it was CNR engineer John Black and his wife Mildred, governess May Battell and her family, master mariner Harold Hansen, tailors and furniture-makers of the Gorosh clan. And after the Great War, the succession of owners and tenants continued – widows, pile drivers, mill workers, labourers. On until 1925, when Adreanna and Jacobus Twisk – he at first the janitor at First United Church, then a worker on the CP railway, brought a little stability to this old house, staying put and building roots for some fifteen years.

By the time the Second World War came and went, stability was the order of the day at this Georgia Street home. Annie Clarridge and her husband, a rigger named William, stayed six or seven years; followed by a Ukranian immigrant and widow, Pelagin Ivers (nee Scherbina) who stayed a decade. And then, Jack and Seu Yeu Quan.

Jack Quan. a cook, brought his family to this home in 1958, as the street began to shift demographically to include homeowners from the large Asian-Canadian community that had lived in this area – but not on this street – for decades. They stayed the longest, making this their place until 1987. Then a few years of short tenancies and long vacancies til my mom and dad bought in 1990. Mom and dad were working with the Downtown Eastside Seniors’ Centre and the Portland Hotel Society, looking for a place close to work and community after careers spent travelling. And so our family’s own 17-year stint there began.

Wow. Lots there to give the home some character. And that’s just the tenancy roster. The neighbourhood indeed went though its share of changes over the years while families moved in and out. Harris Street, as mentioned above, became East Georgia in 1915, and a number of neighbouring roads saw names changed – Glen Drive, now home of the famous La Casa Gelato, was intially called Boundary Avenue; Frances Street, named for the Anglican nun who opened one of Vancouver’s first hospitals and social service centres, St Luke’s; Union Street – this replacing Barnard Street for no other reason than it was often mis-heard as Burrard. And what we now know as Princess Street originally having been called Dupont, that name dropped to shake the reputation Dupont had as a sex-workers’ stroll.

There was the streetcar, as I’ve mentioned. And a firehouse, just a few blocks away at Keefer and Vernon. And it was, from, the start a neighbourhood that mixed residential homes with light industry, an area of working class folks and working class homes. A diverse neighbourhood, peopled by immigrants from China, Russia, Italy, Japan, by seamstresses and housewives, workers on ships and workers in lumbercamps, railway workers, cooks, and the often-unemployed.

This was the neighborhood where crowds attacked Chinese workers in 1907. This is the neighbourhood where Hogan’s Alley housed a vibrant black community until it was razed with the construction of the second Georgia Viaduct in 1970. This was the neighbourhood where the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, held free speech fights in 1909 and 1910, refusing to shut up for cops or capital. It’s the neighbourhood where militant moms blockaded railway cars, where sex workers demanded and demand still spaces free from police harassment, where anarchists and punk rockers make their squats, where kids still play hockey in the street with whatever bits of wood are handy and whatever best approximates a puck.

It was my neighbourhood. And always will be, somehow. But I appreciated it, loved it, understood it, on a whole other level after taking a read through the history of that one house. And y’know, Vancouver’s full of them. The East Side, especially, is full of them. And each is full of its own set of stories, and holds somewhere its own mapbook to our past.

Just a house. But sometimes that’s enough.

VANCOUVER – Usually, neighbourhoods are happy to get a new library. But a proposal to build a $14.5-million library at Hastings and Heatley has some Strathcona residents outraged because it would involve tearing down historic buildings in the city’s oldest neighbourhood.

The main bone of contention is the Heatley Block, a two-storey commercial building that has four commercial spaces on the main floor and a rooming house above. Built in 1930, it is the only “character” building left on a fairly bleak strip of Hastings.

“The City of Vancouver went out real estate shopping for a site for the new public library, and they just happened to buy the best building on that part of Hastings,” says John Atkin of the Strathcona Residents Association.

“Here we have a building that has people living in it, and retail on the ground floor, viable stores, and we’re going to wipe it out.

“It just seems [dumb] to have purchased the best building on Hastings street architecturally and you’re going to blow it up. I don’t care what the amenity is that we’re getting out of it, it just seems wrong.”

The Heatley Block isn’t on the city’s official heritage register, which was compiled in 1985 and is about to be upgraded. Neither are two old houses on the same site which date to 1889 and 1898. The 1889 structure is probably one of the 10 oldest houses in Vancouver.

Strathcona resident Claudine Michaud says the Heatley Block and the old houses have heritage merit, whether they’re on the official list or not. She sees it as a Strathcona version of the Black Swan building in Kitsilano, another handsome old building with no heritage status that was recently demolished.

“[The Heatley Block is] one of the last buildings of its kind in the city,” said Michaud. “It’s a very handsome building.”

Atkin fears that if the Heatley Block is torn down, it would help cement a commercial dead zone on Hastings, where there are several social housing buildings in the adjacent two blocks.

“If our other stated aim is to revitalize Hastings Street, we’ve done a pretty lousy job of it,” he said.

“We’ve allowed all these social services agencies to go in, and allowed them to escape the requirement for retail.

“There may not be any retail to go on Hastings Street right away, but 10 years from now, as the condo boom keeps moving, we’re going to see people wanting to do retail on Hastings and there won’t be any space.”

The city’s real estate department purchased the three lots on the Heatley block site for $1.8 million on June 15. It is also looking to buy an old welfare office next door to make a bigger library. The office is now co-owned and occupied by the Pivot Legal Society, an advocacy group that bought it for $850,000 two years ago. The proposed library could be up to 16,000 square feet, up from 1,500 square feet at the current Strathcona library.

Paul Whitney of the Vancouver Public Library said the city and library had several meetings with neighbourhood residents about the need for a new library.

“Since the early 1990s, a full- service library branch that serves both the Downtown Eastside and Strathcona communities, and Chinatown, has been a top capital priority for the library board, and we’ve never been able to realize it,” Whitney said.

“We did consultations in 2003 and 2004 and the message we got was that the only way we could do a full-service branch for the disparate communities was to have it on the south side of Hastings Street. People were really clear that it had be on the south side. They wanted it to be as close to the school as possible.”

The Heatley Block met the criteria, so the city snapped it up.

But Michaud feels there may be other factors involved. She said zoning allows for an eight-storey building on the Heatley Block site, and thinks the city wants to build housing on top of the library, as it is doing at the new Mount Pleasant Community Centre at Kingsway and Main.

“We’re concerned they’re going to take full advantage of the zoning on this block to build the full height, in exchange for having a developer pay for the cost of purchasing the land and perhaps building the library,” Michaud said.

“We’re also wondering why they didn’t take the opportunity to buy other buildings that are for sale the next block over, between Heatley and Hawks. These buildings were built in the 1960s or ’70s, they’re single storey, they have no historical value.

“Why didn’t the city snap those up? The only difference is that that block is only zoned for four storeys.”

Atkin said one solution would be to use a brick building on the Strathcona school site at Pender and Heatley for the library.

But Whitney said the problem with the school building is that it would be “next to impossible to effectively serve the Downtown Eastside community from that facility.”

Apparently the city has bought the Heatley Block on Hastings Street with the intention of tearing it down to build a new city library. The Heatley Block is an important heritage apartment building and storefront (1931) attached to two houses also slated for demolition – built in 1889 and 1889. In its place the city is proposing an 8-story modern building, which will significantly change the character of that part of Strathcona.

But there are alternatives!

Please go to these sites dedicated to the preservation of the Heatley Block and get involved with the fight to save what little historic East Vancouver is left:

• Heatley Block @ Blogspot
• Strathcona-Hastings.org
• Heritage Vancouver – Top Ten Endangered Sites 2008

It is not too late to bring options to the city for discussion. We encourage everyone who cares about the preservation of East Vancouver heritage sites to let the city know of your concerns and support the proposal to locate the library into the old Strathcona School site instead.

On Canada Day Brian and I woke up early. A sunny Tuesday, already warm at 6:30 am, I was itching to go for a swim somewhere in the lower mainland despite the potential for holiday hordes lathering themselves up with sunscreen and indulging their screaming children with “fun times outdoors”. Whatever. Brian and I figured we could hit Sasamat (in Port Moody) early, have a quick jog around the lake and a dip before 10:30 and then get outta there before the crowds descended, right?

Well. Except for that little matter of the swim meet organized for that morning. Drove all the way out to Port Moody just to be met by hundreds of cars jostling with each other in the dusty parking lot and people every which way blowing up floating devices and ensuring their coolers were properly loaded to take down to the beach. So we decided to blow over to Buntzen Lake instead – and although we were early enough to get ourselves parking and a little space to dump our towels on the beach , the joy of swimming was not to be mine there either. Still being fed by melt-off from the surrounding mountains, Buntzen was close to freezing and I could not force my body to take the plunge. (I am a cold-water swimmer quite happily – the water has to be atrociously low temperature before I refuse to swim.)

All the way from East Van to Port Moody and by 10:30 Buntzen was becoming over-crowded with early barbeque-ers and pop-up bug screens so it wasn’t like we wanted to hang out until the day got warmer for a potential bout of hypothermia. We left, a little dejected, and determined to get the hell out of the suburbs and back to our hood for some relaxing at least!

Why not Trout Lake? Brian asked when we got back in the car. The lake that is 15 blocks from my house. The one I have never swam in during my entire adulthood living in the area. Why not Trout Lake? I said. At least then we can write about it for Viaduct.

I’m going to step out of the narrative for a moment here to explain that while I have long lived close to Trout Lake, and really enjoy the park (officially John Hendry Park – named after the sawmill baron whose family donated the land to the city), I have always found the idea of swimming in East Vancouver a little off-putting. A spot of neighbourhood prejudice if you will, I’ve had this vague notion that somehow the lake bottom would be littered with broken glass or perhaps the odd hypodermic needle, even though the park is nowhere near the skids. And if not garbage, then the water must be really polluted right?

On the drive back from Port Moody, Brian and I talked about this. Nothing I have ever actually heard or seen at Trout Lake, has given me that impression that it wasn’t safe or clean. And every time I go, there are dozens of children playing in the water with a lifeguard on duty until 9 pm at night all summer long. According to a friend who swims there regularly, the water is routinely tested for fecal coliform and often comes back with much lower levels than Vancouver’s most popular swimming beach at English Bay (this most recent water quality report confirming it – levels in this study being non-existent). A prejudice entirely about the “east” part of Vancouver, about the urban nature of the park – somehow being inferior to the wilds of Port Moody and area. Something to get over, clearly.

We drove the 45 minutes back to the hood, turning off Victoria at 19th and then onto the treed lane to the parking area. Distanced from the suburban packs with their angry summer faces (too crowded! too many screaming children in the back seat!) we found Trout Lake populated by a few locals and their kids splashing about in the shallow water. It was Canada Day here too, with picnics and kids eating concession french fries – but the people just seemed – I dunno – more laid back. Less harried. Most of them had obviously walked or taken transit from elsewhere in the neighbourhood. No one was doing the big all-day-giant-family outings we had seen at Buntzen and Sasamat. No need to jostle or rush past anyone else to get the “perfect” spot because thousands of people hadn’t descended on the tiny strip of beach and concession all at once.

For over one hundred years, Vancouverites have been coming here to swim, boat and ice skate (back when it still got cold enough) – which makes sense given that it is the only lake within Vancouver city limits.

Situated on 68 acres of land, Trout Lake is often listed (by the Parks Board, among others) as the site of an early sawmill in Vancouver, though as far as we can tell, it was never a mill site but a water source for the Hastings Sawmill down on the waterfront at Dunlevy – with a flume running from the lake to the waterfront (a distance of several kilometres) in the late 1800s. A peat bog that apparently had four different creeks draining into it, the lake never did contain trout with the exception of a few stocking efforts over the years, but has been popularly known by the name since locals started using it for recreation. Owned by the family of John Hendry (the owner of Hastings Sawmill among other local interests), the land was donated in 1926 to the city under the condition that it be named “john Hendry Park”. Interestingly, while the city took the land in the interests of local recreation, it wasn’t until 1942 that the Parks Board started referring to it by this name. Of course locals have pretty much always called it “Trout Lake” despite its official name. (Apparently the non-existent fish have more resonance for locals than the name of a long-deceased logging baron). Shortly after becoming a park, the first lifeguard post was set up – 1928 – and has been staffed through the summers since – these days mostly to ensure no one swims outside the boundaries and into the parts of the lake that have been planted with grasses and marsh plants. And of course over the years picnic facilities have been set up, paths have been sculpted in the shade of the trees and bushes that surround the park. A leash-free dog park takes up one corner and on the Victoria side of park is a community center, tennis courts, parking lots, and sports fields.

But oddly, despite the number of years in existence, despite the number of events and people who have passed through the park in its lifespan, there is tremendously little recorded history about it. Few photographs exist in Vancouver’s city archives, and the history of the park is often written with factual inaccuracy. It is impossible to find any information online about the restoration of the green space around the park that took place in the 80s and 90s. Twenty-four hectares in the middle of East Vancouver and it could just as easily not exist except to those who use it as their community park. It is not a destination that people plan to go to like Sasamat or Buntzen – and yet many neighbourhood activities revolve around it. And I suppose it’s better that way, because who needs the crowds that popularity would bring?

As I mentioned above, on Canada Day there were no crowds and I hazard to guess that this was the least populated beach in the whole lower mainland despite being situated in a high-density neighbourhood. When I finally did get around to taking a dip I found the water refreshing but warm, a bit murky and deep enough for proper swimming. A quick spin out and around the floating dock at the edge of the swimming boundary and I was hooked on the fact that this place was available only blocks from my house. A few other adults were out swimming along the perimeter of the rope – enough laps and you can get a work out without being in the shallow kids zone near the beach. Brian even came out to join me for a second dip after I had dried in the sun from the first – concurring with me that in fact that water was not at all too cold or murky for swimming (though you might not want to drink it).

Best part? No milfoil and no swimmer’s itch afterwards – which surprised me since these exist in pretty much every other lake in BC these days (both invasives that barely existed when I was a small child). Taking an outdoor shower at the edge of the beach is not a bad idea anyways. The peaty nature of the lake means that you may encounter some lake scunge in the suit if you don’t have a rinse.

As we have been blessed with a warm and sunny July, I have since been back a few times to swim after work, relishing the look of shock on people’s faces when I tell them I’m going to swim at Trout Lake. The same one I used to wear before I realized that my prejudice was unfounded. After 15 years it was probably about time, and it means my future summers in the neighbourhood will be that much more enjoyable. Thank goodness for the suburban hordes on Canada Day – reminders of who I don’t want to become and where I do not want to be.