What happened was, we went to a party at Shane and Ally’s place on East First Ave at a mixed residential-commercial development with a common rooftop garden. We barbecued up there, sharing the space amicably with a couple of other parties. The view was compelling and the clouds were interesting.
This is looking West from more or less here.
Notice that in the foreground there’s quite a bit of low-rise low-rent industrial land; every city needs to earn its living and to have cheap neighborhoods, but the density doesn’t feel right.
Doug Coupland (I believe it was in City of Glass) said “In 100 years, Paris will still be Paris and New York will still be New York. What will Vancouver be?” He had a point, and the point is that Vancouver is profoundly unfinished; we’re making it up as we go along. Let me underline the point by turning the camera northeast.
In one of these vacant spaces (not shown here) there was some sort of squatter thing happening, with a nice semi-modern Greyhound-style bus apparently parked permanently with lawn chairs, sort of a one-inhabitant trailer park.
Bear in mind that this is all within spitting distance of some of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the world’s most expensive real-state markets; bubble-icious say some.
But then the clouds kept pulling the front of the camera back to the west.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Brent Rockwood (Jun 21 2010, at 05:39)
Except, except, New York looks much the same at the fringes of the outer boroughs and Paris is two thousand years old.
I've spent less than a month in Vancouver, but I think if I were a resident I would be plenty proud of the general lack of sprawl compared to plenty of other young North American cities.
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From: MIke (Jun 21 2010, at 23:04)
A Google search for "What happened was" on your site returns 1,000 results. Is this your trademark literary device (or as you would write it in deutschecaps, your "Trademark Literary Device"), or, you know, a verbal tic? Or perhaps a Canadianism?
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