Vancouver Geomancy: Walk Number One, Part 2

But now backpackers is closed, and Concord Pacific has joined Paris Block just west of Pigeon Park with the ironic name of Greenwhich, and the city have completed this section of the Carral Street Greenway. The desired effect however is undetermined as the physical space of the area, especially at Pender and Carall, is in a sort of limbo. Tinseltown sits like an empty citadel of the spectacle off to the right, a massive China Town gate cast shadows on the bizarre Jack Chow building, the scars of the BC Electric below, and the lonely history of Silk Road. The new greenway looks bright and foreign amid the crumbling entranceway to Chinatown, past the School of Hypnosis (?) and the eery calmness of Doctor Sun Yet Sen gardens.

The city has created or commissioned a strange pedestrian bridge over Carrall leading to an artificial turf field tucked in between the DTES and the Georgia Viaduct, between the cavernous space created by GM Place and BC Place; their forboding concrete facades block out the sun where a few homeless have set up under the Skytrain. If you keep walking through the soccer field and past the tennis courts, you get an overwhelming feeling you are in sort of manufactured situation, a sort of video game not unlike Sim City. The bright green pitch, the towering lights, a skatepark tucked under a mass of twisting concrete. Then there is the surreal repo-man feeling as you walk past the Vancouver City Impound Lot, where smoldering, rusted, wrecks regularly haunt the series of concrete overpasses. Duck through here! Duck through the tunnel at the Cobalt because who knows how long thats going to be there as the monstrosity that is the Gatweway development is already threatening to chew up BCER Workers Quarters right beside it.

Across the street is one of the most important but subtle non-spaces in the city. It is the sight of former black community Hogan's Alley, as well as the backdrop to Jeff Wall's famous piece The Storyteller. Last year around this time the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project participated in a guerilla gardening action intended to highlight the fact this part of town was razed to put in a freeway. Today, the columns that support the massive bridge are decorated with some of the best past-ups in town.

Meanwhile to the left the remnants of Main street's gritty history are left in ruins as Venus Theatre was demolished to make way for the condo Ginger. There's a sense of claustrophobia. You are trapped by the swathe of onramps on one side, and now, as you make your way east, you are hemmed in my a massive empty field, a legacy of the dot com bubble. Beyond the much photographed empty lot are train tracks that act to further seal off the downtown eastside from Mount Pleasant and beyond.

The ground beneath you is artificial. It was placed there CN as they cut a massive trench beside Grandview highway. Main Street used to be a bridge over False Creek, but it might as well still be one, as it bridges the light industrial wasteland between Chinatown and Uptown. But as work progresses on the Olympic Village, the area is changing rapidly. Talk of light rail connecting Granville Island to the Millennium Water development, through Gastown and eventually to Stanley Park is only going to accelerate this process.

Despite the introduction, or perhaps re-introduction, of three heritage houses to the corner of Gore and Union, the intersection has an eery quality to it. The fried yellow grass behind you fades into a path that cuts under the first of many housing projects in Strathcona. Its as almost as though Chinatown is sliced off at Gore, allowing for a sudden shift in mood dictated by the suburban heritage of Strathcona proper. Suddenly blackberry bushes compete with rusted fences in gravel alleyways. The sound of mahjongg tiles echoes as you drift above the foundations of the pre-grade lots, the legacy of The Syndicate of Gentlemen.

There really are no more obstacles to drifting at this point until you get to the train tracks at Raymur. Here you can either cross the overpass, veer left towards the dead end of the Port of Vancouver, or go right across Venables, past the majestic Parker Mattress Factory, until you end up in some sort of industrial limbo near the Strathcona Community Gardens, one of Vancouver's best kept secrets. Or you can continue along the rusted tracks, past makeshift shacks under First Street, and eventually to VCC Skytrain Station. Perhaps a good place to leave off...