Main Street Legion / Main Street Projects
I spent this past Sunday on Main Street documenting signs of gentrification for Vancouver’s Granville Magazine.
Duffin Donuts, once a too-regular stop on my walks home from school at 33rd Avenue and Main St, is now a hole in the ground edged with covered walkways and good-no-side plywood barriers. A building with the inspired moniker “33rd & Main” is set to fill the hole, and the a 1- and 2-bedroom development claims that “As the city transforms, Main & 33rd will be the new gateway to Vancouver”. Boarded up across the street is the shell of the former Abbey’s Sporting Goods, where Abbey and Abbey Jrs. sold my parents miniature shin guards and cleats for their two “footballing” lads.
When my parents decided that Canada, and Vancouver, was where they wanted to stay, our home at 37th and Prince Edward Avenue, two blocks east of Main, was the first house we stayed in long enough for my architect father to consider renovations. Such was the reputation of the neighborhood at the time that my mother had serious reservations about moving “to the East Side”. Still, move there we did, and in that neighborhood I learned to ride my first two-wheel bicycle, played street hockey during the Canucks’ famous ’94-’95 playoff run and ate sticky summer Freezies until the corners of my mouth were raw.
Many of my school friends lived at Main and 37th in that childhood hide-and-seek dream known as the Main Street housing projects. These have now been loudly torn down save for a small hold-out row of off-white stucco residences, a fenced peninsula of well-loved homes extending into the dark heart of a soil reclamation venture.
In high school, in the fall, my friends and I would scour the no-man’s-land of VCR and vacuum repair shops between 28th and 33rd looking for illegal fireworks. The convenience stores that sold these to us have now gone the way of the family-run sports shop, replaced by an up-scale grocery on the ground level of an up-scale apartment building. The commercial alcoves they once occupied are slowly filling with boutiques and coffee shops, old news for Main St residents a few blocks north but a marked change for the once trendless neutral ground.
For better or for worse, the Ford dealership is now gone – I can no longer walk past and reminisce about heel-flipping its gaps on my skateboard, but it can no longer swindle Escort-driving mothers like mine over timing belts and brake pads. The community bike shop across the street is thriving, and I consider it one of the outposts drawing Main’s Peter Pans southward and into uncharted territory.
Incidentally, I photographed Main Street on my iPhone, a tool of necessary evil in my line of work but the quintessential identifier of the youthful wave that is transforming the neighborhood.
Outtakes from recent work for the Canucks Autism Network, photographing the 2nd Annual BMO Saccomaniacs Golf Tournament, with proceeds going to CAN and Autism Speaks, and West Coast Fishing Club’s fourth annual Fishing for Kids Fundraising Tournament cast-off breakfast, with proceeds going to CAN and the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation.
“After many delays and dissappointments, we succeeded at last in obtaining a passage in a fast-sailing brig, the Laurel, of Greenock; and favourable winds are now rapidly carrying us across the Atlantic … The morning light found our vessel dashing gallantly along, with a favourable breeze, through the north channel; that day we saw the last of the Hebrides, and before night lost sight of the north coast of Ireland. A wide expanse of water and sky is now our only prospect, unvaried by any object save the distant and scarcely to be traced outline of some vessel just seen at the verge of the horizon, or sometimes a few sea-fowl. I love to watch these wanderers of the ocean, as they rise and fall with the rocking billows, or flit about our vessel; and often I wonder whence they came, to what distant shore they are bound, and if they make the rude wave their home and resting-place during the long day and dark night.”
Catharine Parr Trail, The Backwoods of Canada
I took a new toy tool to the beach (really, I took it everywhere) yesterday for a bit of sunny experimentation. I reluctantly admit finding immense joy in the spontaneity this little gadget enables: for anyone who’s ever played with a Holga camera, sticky-fingered from electrical taped riding white-knuckled down to the pro lab, the instant gratification is most welcome.
Still, I’m torn. When a skeptical late-adopter like myself can be so easily swayed it is easy to see how quickly analog processes can be flushed out. My generation grew up with Polaroids of their parents in family albums, sand-and-dirt-toned from time on shelves with mustached fathers holding wrinkly babies in their Hasselhoff laps (really, didn’t everybody’s dad look the same in 1985?). My generation’s children will most likely grow up looking at iPhone photos of their parents, and that idea holds no romance for me.
A few weeks ago I picked up a pack of PX100 Instant Film from my local lab. Unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) the SX-70 I rescued from the Georgia Strait is fried, but for those of us still hopelessly in love with the real thing, The Impossible Project has succeeded in revitalizing instant photography, salvaging old batches of Polaroid film and engineering new chemistry in classic formats. I encourage you to blow the dust off that old Land Camera and check them out – I’ll be breathing new life into my drowned SX-70, and I’ll be posting fun new fauxtographs here as well.
This past Friday I was in Mount Pleasant with the Canucks Autism Network photographing the ‘Soup from the Soul’ day camp. From the Canucks Autism website,
“Soul from the Soul CAMP is a unique, week long summer experience for teens aged 15 -20 with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This is a pre-vocational day camp designed to equip students with basic culinary skills and the ability to carry out tasks in an industrial kitchen environment, with confidence. Our goal is to provide participants the opportunity to gain basic knowledge about food preparation, safety, food handling and knife skills. Participants will create soup recipes that have been generously donated by local chefs, visit local kitchens and learn about fire safety from the Vancouver Fire Department. All soup will be donated to a downtown eastside charity and the host facility food program. These donations ensure that no food will go to waste and hill help Vancouver’s needy. CAN is looking for 2-3 volunteers to assist participants through prep for soup recipes, and to help with planned activities, such as taking transit, visiting the Food Bank, fire department, culinary schools and an iron chef competition between participants.”
