[spmarshall]

Vancouver's Downtown East Side is probably the most blighted and most infamous neighbourhood in Canada. The near North End of Winnipeg (just north of the CP tracks) is also poor and blighted, but nothing like this.

Interestingly, Chinatown, a popular tourist spot lies only a block south of Hastings, Vancouver's skid row, and Gastown lies just to the north/northwest. Tourists end up in the DTES all the time, and I hope to show how the area has such a stark contrast.

Two blocks from Granville, the main shopping/nightlife street (with Pacific Centre, the downtown mall), Hastings starts to show its dark side.

By Cambie, Hastings looks really rough.

At Abbott and Hastings is the abandoned Woodward's store. It closed in the mid 1990s, and is awaiting redevelopment. The landmark "W" at the top of its tower is now relit as a show of confidence and promise by the city.

By this point, I had to watch where I walked, and had to be careful where I pointed the camera. I did not dare step into the alleys, as hypodermic needles and condoms littered the ground, and people were shooting up and urinating behind dumpsters.

I wasn't as brave as this guy, whose pics you can still see on SSP.

Marc Emery's seed shop is on Hastings, just west of the DTES.

Along Pender, one street south of Hastings, is Chinatown. I am walking east from Cambie.

Nice Chinatown gate. I bet it keeps Chinatown in its place...downtown.

The Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Park:

Peering into an alley towards Hastings:

Back to Hastings and Main:

And into Gastown:

Night shot of the clock:

Go south one block, and there's Woodward's.

Back towards Granville, a closed Sears store (note the old letters). I wonder if this closed when the Eaton's in the Pacific Centre was converted to Sears, or before.

Note the high-emission vehicle (SUV), low-emission vehicle (Smart Car) and the no-emission vehicle (trolley bus).

 

[ganjavih]

Nice tour, spm. I really need to hit the west coast again. I was last in Vancouver in the late 90s and it really didn't excite me too much. I must have missed something because people rant and rave about it all the time... need to give it another chance.

 

[mpolo2]

^ go in early march. The place always seems a little more shiny when there is a thirty degree temperature differential.

also, IMO the DT east side gets a worse rep than it deserves. In my younger days we used to roam around there in the middle of the night looking for after-hours places. If you are not looking for trouble, it is very highly unlikely it will find you either. Now, I wouldn't want to find out my kid was skipping school and hanging out around there, but neither would I feel any more nervous hanging out there than I would at Queen & Landsown or Queen & Shourbourne, etc.

 

[spmarshall]

The things I like about Vancouver is the superior regional planning, and the great transport system. The natural setting is wonderful too, and the new condo architecture is nice, but it wouln't take much for Toronto to match it. There are a few neighbourhoods that I wished I had more time for - Kitslano, Commerical Street, even North Van, but I find Toronto has more than enough to keep me interested.

But half my pics in this set aren't things to rant and rave about, that's for sure. It shows some of the worst of Vancouver, and the DTES is far worse than anything I've seen in Canada.

 

[wyliepoon]

Interesting photos! I was a bit "shocked" at looking at the gritty side of Vancouver, after having looked at the beautiful, condo-lined postcard shots of the city. Ironically, the East Side views make Vancouver look more "mature" and more like a big city!

I'm also shocked at the Chinatown views. I had the impression, from looking at photos and watching Vancouver programming on Fairchild TV, that Vancouver's Chinatown is a bustling heart for one of North America's largest Chinese communities. But the photos above show a surprisingly sterile Chinatown, something like the Chinatown in Calgary. Any reason why?

 

[mpolo2]

No Vancouver's chinatown is a busy as Toronto's. The shots are mostly along Hastings which is not really the centre of thigns. Go there on a weekend morning and it is v. busy. Also, I hear Vancouver's chinatown is growing again as the surrounding area improves. A lot of money is moving into Gastown to clean it up and sell lofts there. Even the lower east side is improving slowly, so some developer's have moved in to try and sell the area. There is a small mall + condo tower (International Village) and a TNT.

 

[ganjavih]

The thing that shocked me about Vancouver's Chinatown was the lack of restaurants. My friend and I wandered around desperately for somewhere to have lunch. Someone told me all the restaurants were in the burbs. I much prefer Toronto's Chinatown which is one of my favourites... only San Francisco's was up there with it, IMHO. Now if only we could do something about those strange odours in the summertime... but I digress...

 

[officedweller]

Chinatown isn't very busy at night - due to the perception (or reality?) that the area isn't safe. The summer Chinatown night market has tried to reverse hat trend. In addition, condos are encroaching into the area, so he nighttime population should increase despite the Hastings area. The restaurants are scattered around the city and in Richmond - head down to Richmond and there are lots of restaurants everywhere - unfortunately, most are in strip malls that pervade Richmond's downtown.

Harbour Centre, way way back used to be a local department store called Spencer's. At some point it was bought out by Eaton's, then when Eaton's moved up to Pacific Centre in the early 1970s, the site was redeveloped into a mixed use heritage project and office tower and Sears moved into the former department store space (which was expanded with the construction of the Harbour Centre office tower above) - probably in the late 1970s or early 1980s. That was Sears first venture into a downtown store in Canada. It closed due to poor sales back in the late 1980s and Simon Fraser University Downtown eventually moved in. Sears didn't reappear downtown until it took over the bankrupt Eatons chain and eventually converted the Pacific Centre store to a Sears.

Back in the 1980s, the main department stores in Vancouver were Woodwards (shown above further east on Hastings - which even back then was getting sketchy), Sears at Harbour Centre, Eaton's at Pacific Centre and The Bay in its historic store. In the early 1990s Woodward's wanted to move uptown closer to Pacific Centre into a project proposed by Tri-Lea (which had consolidated the two city blocks north of The Bay for an enclosed mall) but the City refused to allow another enclosed mall downtown, instead favouring street front retail. Those parcels have since been developed piecemeal.

The Woodward's redevelopment project recenty broke ground - its redevelopment is supposed to be the trigger for the rejuvenation of the area - time will tell.

 

[shawnmicallef]

Our chinatown gate [murmur] sign! I put that up in sept '03.

 

[spmarshall]

Officedweller,

Thanks for the story on the department stores. The ghost lettering from Sears on the Harbour Centre is still very visible.

Wylie - you might be interested to hear that the Fairchild media group is on Broadway (near Cambie or Granville, I can't remember), which is nowhere near Chinatown, or even Richmond.

 

[Christopher DeWolf]

the actual (as opposed to historic) heart of vancouver's chinese community is really richmond. chinatown caters mostly to tourists and local chinese who live in strathcona (the adjacent residential neighbourhood). that said, it's usually pretty busy.

there's a popular two-block night market in chinatown... but in richmond there is a giant night market with hundreds of stalls that attracts over 10,000 people every weekend night.

another factor is the relative dispersal of vancouver's chinese community -- the city of vancouver is 30% chinese, richmond is 40% chinese, burnaby 20% and so forth -- which means that chinese amenities are present in large swaths of greater vancouver. there are commercial blocks on the wealthy west side of vancouver that are occupied exclusively by chinese businesses, for instance, and asian supermarkets like T&T are spread fairly evenly throughout the city.

anecdotally, my girlfriend's chinese parents live in a condo downtown, on richards street, not too far from chinatown. they go to the chinatown T&T for groceries, but i doubt they can even recall the last time they set foot in chinatown itself.