The ThunderBlogs

“If you want hear the cutting-edge of electronica music, you have to be here tonight,” said John Harris, a 36 year-old resident of Whistler, pointing to a ticket in his hand.  Harris waited in line at Highlife Records and Music, a music store on Commercial Drive, one of the hippest districts of Vancouver.

By “here,” Harris did not mean Commercial Drive.  Harris meant a multi-purpose art space called W2, located in the Downtown Eastside, across the street from the new Woodward’s Building.  Mixed-usage is the philosophy behind the development of this part of town, and for better or for worse, the effects are being seen.

To take a walk in and around The Woodward’s Building reveals a wellness centre, a ritzy market called Nester’s, a soon to open Hiro’s Sushi, Simon Fraser University Woodward campus, a JJ Bean coffee shop, a London Drugs, a trendy drinking hole called The Charles Bar, new townhouses and apartments that sell for $400,000 and more, 250 social housing rooms and single occupancy units.  And all of this used to be one of toughest and poorest areas of the city.

“Oh yeah, it has changed a lot.  I wasn’t for it at first, but I’m all for it now,” said Keith Durocher, 36, who just recently opened Penny Black Tattoo Parlor and has lived in the area for ten years.  “With the development, new affluence is bringing new foot traffic in and business.”

And W2 encapsulate this progression.  It is a 8800 square foot “community arts space” with a cafe and “community media centre” used for various purposes.  Officially, “W2 works with residents of Downtown Eastside as a Print and Digital Publishing Centre, engages with youth support programs and collaborates with Woodward’s SFU’s campus, the Kootenay School of Writing and other artists, designers, musicians and DJs.”

Williams Sheppard, a local resident of over ten years and a recently employed Woodward’s security guard, often sees people line up outside of W2.  He also said he likes the development that he sees.  “Sure, it is good.  It gives entrepreneurs the chance to spice their spirits and start something.  People need it.  They got residences now, not stuffed-up hotels.  People feel safer.”

On a Saturday night and a half-an-hour walk from Commercial drive, people lined up for the event at W2 which Harris spoke of.  Inside, a massive hangar-like lounge with sofas, digital graffiti artists, and bartenders were the first to greet you.  Further in, though, revealed other sectioned-off rooms used for art exhibitions, such as the “human-powered party train,” and works by Downtown Eastside artists like Justin Sekiguchi, a Japanese-Canadian outreach worker and programming staff of Oppenheimer Park.  A DJ in a mock gas mask mixed records, and created dance floor beats on his Apple computer in yet another room.

With the arrival of spaces like W2, things are only going to get better, according to Sheppard.  “You see that store over there?” he said.  “It’s gone now, but it’ll be leased here in a matter of no time.  Just you wait.”

At the intersection of West Hastings Street and Hamilton Street across the road from Victory Square, the New Amsterdam Café had a constant flow of patrons despite the ominous clouds forming overhead. The midday air was replete with the pungent scent of marijuana, overpowering the crisp smell of the impending rain. Surrounded by various cannabis-related shops, the café was the centre of activity.

The windows above the New Amsterdam Café and the establishment next door, called Cannabis Culture, each displayed a letter to spell out the demand to “Free Marc,” referring to Marc Emery, the marijuana activist currently in U.S. custody for selling marijuana seeds to buyers all over North America.

An orange neon sign overhead spelled out the café’s name and was coupled with a large cannabis leaf logo. Patrons sat around small, circular tables over coffee as their smoke rose overhead inside the establishment. They were seemingly unaware of the onlookers and pedestrians attempting to get a glance inside as they walked down West Hastings Street.

On the sidewalk just outside the café, a man leaned his torso over the day’s collection and grasped the chrome shopping cart as he leveraged his left foot against a thinner rod on the lower storage rack. He then gently lifted his trailing right foot off the ground as the cart quickened its pace down the sloped sidewalk. The wheels rattled and jumped on the rough concrete as the cart whirred past Cannabis Culture and the New Amsterdam Café.

The cart’s momentum and speed decreased as the ground progressively leveled out. The sidewalk then sloped upward, stopping the cart then forcing it to roll backwards. The man’s feet finally met the ground once again and he started to push as gravity pulled the cart in the reverse direction. He then continued up the sidewalk toward his destination.

Children’s screams reverberated from the Henry Anderson Elementary School on Monday afternoon as two large dogs ripped through the school playground.

The children were playing outside during their lunch break when they saw the rottweilers racing toward them. Many children ran to the school while teachers and older students tried to chase the dogs off the grounds.

A panicked voice called: “They’re from the house next door, but nobody’s home!”

Pabby Nigger was preparing lunch when she heard the doorbell ring. An unfamiliar woman with a small dog stood on the porch. The woman was visibly angry and started to curse at Nigger when she opened the door.

Asked about what happened, the woman complained that Nigger’s rottweilers attacked her dog. As Nigger hurried back into the house, she noticed that her four-year-old dogs, Paris and Exel, were missing from their backyard pen. She heard screams from the school playground, one house away, and started to run.

By this time, the teachers gathered all children inside the school. No one was injured.

Kindergarteners pressed their faces against the front window, which overlooks the parking lot. Older students peered out of the portable classrooms at the back of the school. Their excited conversations carried across school grounds.

The dogs ran across the parking lot and circled the building. Nigger followed. She was able to catch them quickly after they obeyed her command.

“She got them now!” sighed one of the teachers in relief when Nigger turned the corner, holding both dogs by their collars.

Catherine Ludwig, the elementary school’s vice-principal, ordered to keep the children in the building for the remainder of lunch. She stressed that the incident was very serious for the school.

The Richmond Animal Protection Society arrived shortly after the incident. They questioned Nigger, but let her return home with the dogs after agreeing that their escape was an accident.

“This has never happened before,” Nigger said as she sat in her living room next to her husband. He was equally surprised by the event.

Inside the school, Ludwig’s voice sounded over the public address system.

“Children, everything is going just fine,” she said. “We’re doing OK and we’re very proud of you.”

The parking lot and playground became quiet as classes resumed. There were no visible reminders of the afternoon except for the large footprints etched into the playground’s sandbox.

UBC is no stranger to criticism over lack of consultation with students when it comes to campus development. But the design of the new Student Union Building is taking a revolutionary approach of engaging students’ input from the beginning. At least that’s the stated aim.

Last Tuesday, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., the AMS hosted the first of two charrettes with HBBH + BH, the design team behind the New SUB Project. The brainstorming session was open to student participation, despite the noticeable lack of students.

The main level of the SUB buzzed with young to middle-aged men wearing button-up shirts with dark denim jeans or pinstripe pants. Plaid and square-rimmed glasses were recurring themes. The few women present wore sophisticated business wear, while an older gentlemen sported a suit jacket and red bow-tie. Occasionally, students walking by stopped to look at the unusual scene unfolding in their space. Large posters scribbled with ideas and designs covered the windows and walls. Miniature models of the new SUB stood in different corners of the room. Tables and chairs were pushed together into little islands where groups huddled. An organic collaborative process was obviously taking place, but less obvious was whether students were involved, or even invited.

In the back of the room sat Phil Riley, a UBC Masters student in Architecture and graduate from UBC’s Environmental Design program. Wanting to participate, but unable to make the mandatory full-day commitment because he had class, he asked, “Why didn’t they do it on an evening or a Saturday?” He probably would have had some insightful contributions too, considering his ENDS program involved a semester long project on designing a new SUB.

His buddy Ian Lowrie, a fellow ENDS graduate who participated in the charrette, counted only two undergrads, two architecture students and six ENDS graduates. One of the other ENDS graduates, Jon-Scott Kohli, said, “From my understanding the consultation process that led up to this was very strong, and while in some ways this has been an unparalleled process, and they’ve done so many things right, I also feel like they kind of hit it half way.”

The charrette ended with participants sticking red or blue dots on favourite designs and objectives. “Building as Landscape,” won most blue dots. Closing remarks by AMS VP Ekaterina Dovjenko summed up three main design goals. “Iconic,” was first before, “importance of communities,” and, “making this a fun process.” Kohli expressed concern saying, “A lot of buildings are iconic, that doesn’t make them good buildings. If you focus on making it a good building, then it being iconic will follow.”

As the room cleared the ENDS graduates huddled together feeling left in the dark about how much opportunity for student engagement was still to come.

The fedora on Dem Deane’s head nested a single white feather in its crown. Dripping from the rain still misting down, its brim overshadowed a face bracketed by two glass earring studs. Its plaid pattern matched that of the closed umbrella—an antique Burberry—he gripped as a cane in his hand.

Despite displaying the trappings of a TV pimp (minus the mink coat, but including a gold front tooth), Deane has a serious mien and the mind of a compassionate, inquiring citizen. And the job of a male prostitute.

It hasn’t always been this way. Born on a Cree reserve near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Deane, 38, studied international relations for four years at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. There he debated issues of global inequality and justice with students from India to Mexico, Bangladesh and Guatemala.

Disappointed with the lack of attention paid Canada’s own social disparities, Deane left without a degree. He made his way west over several years, residing in Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton before settling in Vancouver.

Now he stood in an alcove at the corner of Homer and Drake. His cigarette smoke mingled with the steam boiling off a streetlamp which cast his shadow into the road, intersecting a passing blue Chrysler sedan that braked gradually, then carried on.

“Business is slow tonight,” he said.

For several years dozens of Craigslist ads posted daily under “Erotic Services” have presented an alternative to those offered by Deane. Studies assessing how digital media impacts male streetwalkers are nonexistent. Studies in Canada assessing male streetwalkers, period, are rarely on government radar.

But a recent police crackdown on online sex-related ads has likely made some Johns wary of the digital route.

The Erotic Services category now requires anyone posting under it to provide a working phone number and to pay a $10 fee with a valid credit card. Supposedly this allows legitimate escort businesses to continue advertising, while eliminating illegal solicitors.

Craigslist removed the section entirely in the United States this month due to claims it aided in prostitution and human trafficking.

In Vancouver, condominium development and gentrification are more responsible for pushing male prostitutes out of Yaletown than anything else, Deane said. The solicitors who remain come out later at night to avoid confrontations with neighbourhood residents.

A long-haired young man with a moustache walked by Deane’s alcove. The two exchanged nods of recognition.

“He’s probably heading to the shelter,” Deane said. A Covenant House facility two blocks away hosts young people for extended stays and offers weekly HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C discussion groups for men.

“Never been, myself,” Deane said. The air surrounding him sponged out a smell of wet pavement. His eyes crawled around the corner and back.

“Hope I never have to.”

An afternoon in Queen Elizabeth Park accompanied by the leftovers of summer. Atop this particular hill: a stunning view of downtown Vancouver, Seasons in the Park and the Bloedel Conservatory.

The conservatory is a curious building.  Think Bio-Dome, circa 1995.  Whatever happened to Pauly Shore?

A West Coast Sightseeing bus unloads a bus full of camera-toting seniors.  Pants and light jackets.  Sunglasses.  A tourist with a camcorder trips over his own feet: moment captured with hilarity.

Aaron Jasper, once a tour bus operator himself, stands outside the Conservatory talking to a CTV cameraman.  Jasper is chairman of the Vancouver Park Board, which voted unanimously Monday to keep the conservatory open.

Conservatory stays.  Petting zoo goes.  That’s the story.

The conservatory will remain open with help from the Friends of Bloedel Association and the VanDusen Botanical Garden Association.  The Vancouver icon first opened in 1969.

Mavis Hnidy is happy with the park board’s decision last night.  She has been a cashier at the conservatory for six years and is one of the founding members of the Friends association.  She greeted Jasper with excitement as he entered the conservatory this afternoon.  “Thank you, thank you,” she said as she shook his hand.

The conservatory seems like a good place to take your children, if you have any.  It’s probably a good place for a cheap date as well.

Admission:

Adult (19-64)                     $5.35

Senior (65+)                       $3.75

Youth (13-18)                     $3.75

Child (6-12)                         $2.70

Pre-Schooler (under 6)   FREE

Humid, lush and bright – arthritics beware.  The geodesic dome is tightly packed with greenery from around the world.  The dense arrangement is littered with signs indicating the name and origin of the plants:

Venus Fly Trap (North/South Carolina), Lollipop Plant (Peru), Rattlesnake Plant (Brazil).

A Bird Watcher’s Check List reminds visitors that botanists and biologists are both welcome here.  The dome is home to more than 100 species of birds.  There are also a number of Koi scattered throughout the ponds.

Excerpts from the conservatory guestbook read:

“Excellent garden”          “I eat bugs”          “I liked the birds”

While the conservatory is a nice place to visit, it does show signs of neglect.  The guest shop is a strange arrangement of watering globes, embroidery patches and batteries.  The Self Guided Tour pamphlet is lacklustre at best.  Promotion outside the conservatory seems non-existent.

As news of the conservatory facelift spreads, visitors to the hilltop landmark will likely increase.  And maybe, just maybe, the Friends-VanDusen partnership will offer a free screening of Bio-Dome?

Condos are springing up all along Kingsway, introducing not only a new landscape to the nearby neighbourhoods but also new dynamics.

Kingsway is a high-traffic road. The road is like an urban desert between 10^th avenue and the northern tip of Collingwood. Despite the wealth of stores and services along the road, cars dominate the scene and few people are on the sidewalks.

Local stores, restaurants and auto-repair shops sporting multilingual signs like “Dong Thanh Supermarket” and “Do Most Auto Repairs” line either side of the road. There are also various religious centres hidden under the disguise of commercial spaces, including the Gold Buddha Monastery, which is housed in a three-storey brick building that looks nothing out of the ordinary aside from a golden awning. But there are few residential buildings along the way, except for the rare upper-levels of stores that have been turned into homes.

Most stores have parking at the rear and other services like TD Bank offer drive-thru. There are few green spaces along the road. The sole purpose of the road seems to be for people with cars to get in and get out – quickly.

But this commercial and robotic landscape is about to change.

Between Mount Pleasant and Collingwood, new condo developments have started to appear. There are the King Edward Village high-rise condos at the corner of King Edward and Knight. These condos were built in 2008 and are modern glass-clad structures ranging from five to 17 floors. There is a mid-rise condo with a modern exterior of glass and brick currently under construction at Gladstone and Kingsway across from a large Canadian Tire. And there are two condo towers of Kingsway 2300, which will be constructed upon demolition of the El Dorado Motor Hotel currently at that location. The El Dorado Motor Hotel, now empty and dilapidated, used to be a popular spot for business travellers and also was a neighbourhood music venue and pub.

In matters of a couple years, the landscape on Kingsway has changed from only two to three-storey flat-roofed commercial spaces, to an interspersion of contemporary and swanky condos. But alongside these developments came corporate logos and large chains. For example, a Starbucks coffee was built into the ground level of a King Edward Village condo – in contrast to the rest of Vancouver, this is the only Starbucks to be found along Kingsway before passing into Burnaby; it is a newcomer.

According to Vancouver-Kingsway MP Don Davies, densification of Kingsway with condos could improve the use of space by densely housing many small households while allowing existing or new stores to occupy the ground levels.

But on the other hand, the transformation of a street that has historically been used for transportation purposes to one for housing a dense population could have negative consequences. How will this new and large population affect the day-to-day interactions of the families living in homes quietly tucked behind Kingsway? What Davies calls densification is known as gentrification to many others, which is often blamed for drastic increases in prices of residential and commercial property. The rapidity of change has created an undeniable possibility that wealthy corporations like Starbucks might slowly conquer Kingsway while small family-owned businesses gradually disappear. Already, there are many empty store windows along Kingsway with large “For Lease” signs hanging, making room for larger businesses to move in.

It rained throughout Saturday night (Sept 18). At 10 a.m. on Sunday, when Dr Nitya Sharma was watching a TV show at his house at 54^th and Main Street, he got a call from one of the tenants living on the basement floor of his house. Lucky Chauhan, the tenant, informed Sharma that the carpet on the passageway of the floor was soaked with water.

Sharma rushed to the basement floor and asked what the tenants did. Chauhan told Sharma that they had done nothing wrong. Both Chauhan and Sharma inspected the taps in kitchen and bathroom of the floor so as to check if all the taps were off. Then Sharma checked the adjacent room where a washing machine was kept to find that the pipe system in that room was also fine.

Sharma put his right hand on his forehead and said “the sewer must have been choked.” The moment Sharma guessed the cause of the problem, his wife Manju said there was similar problem in the neighbouring houses. She said she called her neighbours and confirmed that it was because of a blockade in the drainage system.

Sharma said he witnessed the problem for the first time in seven years since he started living at 54th.

Sharma then called a restoration company asking it clear the mess. The company sent two staff to clear things at Sharma’s house. They reached there only in the evening. David Armstrong, one of the staff, said it was a busy day for them. He said the sewer water had overflown in around 35 houses in the locality at the 54^th alone.

The staff from the restoration company removed the carpet, checked the dampness on the walls, sprayed some disinfectant on the floor and fitted a machine that would absorb the moisture from the floor and walls throughout Sunday night.

On Monday, a staff from a claims company that works in between the restoration company and the insurance company came to inspect, investigate and adjust the damage caused by the overflow of drainage water.

David Copp, an adjuster with Brouwer Claims, said they had 80 cases on Sunday in different parts of Vancouver including Burnaby, West Vancouver and Surrey. He said the problem of drainage overflow appears in mostly old and lower parts of the city where the drainage for rain water and drainage for sanitation are interconnected. He explained that when first big rainfall after the summer washes off leaves and other dirt, it may lead to choking of the drainage system and the drainage water may overflow into the houses.

Copp said the problem is not new. Similar problems are reported two to three times every year. He suggested having separate drainage for rain water and sanitary drainage.

The tinny beep-beep-beeps and hydraulic sighs of heavy equipment drifted onto the porch where Bert Bjorndal stood over an eight-burner grill, scorching salmon filets. Nearby, cyclists in stretchy shorts and riding jerseys milled, having returned from a 100-km bike ride for the Mission to Seafarers, the charity headquartered locally in the old house beside Vancouver’s port.

The ministry endeavors to meet every worker who arrives in the ships that pour into Canada’s largest port each year and to maintain this center, where they can get online, help themselves to a free paperback or buy a beer. Currency from around the world dots the wall by the glass counter where sailors can buy cough drops and postcards. It’s flanked by two racks of donated National Geographic magazines, about 1,000 of them, dating back to early ’70s.

Anything to make a wandering seaman feel at home, on a budget.

“I’ve been working around the water all my life,” Bjorndal said. The Abbotsford marine captain from now makes runs mostly up the coast of British Columbia, and serves on the mission’s board. The cat’s cradle of barbed wire atop the chainlink fence just past the house’s yard was unknown before 9/11, he said. Since then, security has not only kept visitors off the port, it has served to sequester men to boats on their months-long journeys.

“For a lot of the seafarers, they’re like captives,” Bjorndal said. “We’re a one-stop place for taking care of the practical needs of the seafarer.” He turned to the grill, and with a jab of one stout wrist raked the spatula beneath one of the final filets.

The fish moved quickly out of the steam tray – cyclists largely preferred the salmon to the burgers also on the table. But then, fish suited the setting.

The rear corner of the mission is dedicated to a chapel graced with a small pipe organ, six short pews and the same vestry book, its brittle pages now almost half-filled, that has rested there since 1966. A carved wooden triptych dominates the wall behind the altar. The first scene depicts sailors hauling empty nets aboard the side of their ship. In the central panel, the men pray to Christ. In the third and final scene, the nets bulge with fish, and they are whoppers.

A cruise ship leaving port from Canada Place is a moment of widespread awe for the denizens of downtown Vancouver. On a recent Saturday, people on the lower deck of the roadway lined the low concrete wall at its edge as though looking from at the mouth of a cave, and watched a towering white Coral Princess trundle along the dock and out into Vancouver Harbor like a horizontal skyscraper.

Cars stopped directly beneath “no parking” signs beneath the main street, and men in reflective work vests congregated under the shadows to watch.

At street level, as the Coral Princess slunk further north and began its westward turn to the Strait of Georgia, a second ship, the Zuiderdam, exhaling gray-brown diesel smoke and churning up a modest wake for a 85,000-ton vessel, began shuffling away. The constant rumble of traffic and the sound of sawing at a construction site echoed off the Vancouver Convention Centre, but the people lining the rail, a couple of stories above the water, made almost no noise.

For all the spectacle, the port is, in one regard, one of the least intrusive in the world. Along with only the cruise ports in Seattle and Juneau, Alaska, Vancouver’s port permits ships outfitted with suitable electrical systems to plug into the city’s electric grid while docked, allowing the ships to run on something other than diesel while idling. To date, according to Port Metro Vancouver, only Princess and Holland America have invested in the conversion.

The aim of the measure is to keep the air and water at the sort of quality that would attract onloookers. One, a woman wearing black sneakers without socks and a black T-shirt with the Rolling Stones lips logo, strode to the rail as the Zuiderdam crept out to sea. She plopped her baggy purse atop a placard and whipped out a digital camera to shoot a video.

“I just am walking around doing touristy stuff,” said the woman, Eline Toes, a Dutch national and an urban planner working at the Dutch consulate in Vancouver. “I thought it made a beautiful picture, with the clouds on the mountain.”

As the Zwiderdam turned west, sure enough, the green slopes of Grouse Mountain and the stray clouds that bearded its peak framed the ship and the logo it angled to reveal: Holland America Line.