Sunday, April 19, 2015

Man and Pigeon on Hastings.


Driving down Hastings I looked to my left and saw a man looking out of a window near Hastings and Hawkes.  A Pigeon perched quietly on a ledge in the hotel room next door.  The man was looking out down into the sidewalk looking for someone perhaps a visitor a dealer who might be waiting quietly on the corner.  Perhaps he was the dealer himself and was looking down to meet his connection.  We will never know. 

Hastings is trying to clean itself up.  New buildings are being built and restaurants are coming in changing the place forever.   No one who actually lives there can afford to eat in these restaurants.  They do not even have the desire to eat there.  People wander through, the young and the avante garde, the ones who ride bicyles without helmets, the ones who see themselves as artists renting squalid studios hoping to become a part of the grundge and the landscape of suffering that is much of the life down there.  But these new ones do not suffer.  Nor have they known suffering or the agony of having lost their families and their possessions time and time again.  But its cool to be there and its great to be a part of Vancouver's SoHo.  Perhaps its not that bad.  Perhaps just one day one of them will get off their  bikes and buy someone a cup of coffee. 

3 comments:

  1. Interesting allusion to pre-Guilliani NYC, Gabor. If Hastings is to become Vancouver's new Soho, then the municipality of Vancouver (as well as the public at large) has to be prepared to do what is necessary to completely gentrify Vancouver's East End the same way Guilliani gentrified Times Square and much of Manhattan's Lower East Side — make it a crime to be poor.

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    1. Yes I agree Mark. I believe they shipped all the poor of New York somewhere into the suburbs or even further away. Lets hope that doesn't happen in Vancouver.

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