Schools and Prisons

A mostly middle income retail store in the middle of the city will close mid-month. I'm beginning to think the building bordered by Georgia, Robson, Howe and Granville is haunted, that there's a spectre haunting downtown Vancouver (after Karl Marx), a spectre that acts as if there is no use in a centre (after Gertrude Stein).

Eaton's erected César Pelli's dry ice cube design in 1973, a move that impeded the downtown's east-west pedestrian flow. Did this design, this impediment, explain why the incoming 1972 provincial NDP government ditched the former Social Credit-era design of the new provincial law courts' vertical tower in favour of Arthur Erickson's horizontal plaza? People on both sides of the political binary say it was simply a political decision, but I disagree. There are occasionally people on the Left who know something about art and design, just as there are those on the Right who are humanists.

The retail store is Nordstrom's, of course. Opened in the former Eaton's building in 2014 (the building was a Sears for a few years after Eaton's moved on), the building's re-design includes windows, which in summer gorgeously reflect the evening sun, not to mention allow those inside to look at something other than what is for sale. Turns out what is for sale is not so much what consumers are not buying, but where they are buying it. Which is to say online. Rich people love shopping at Holt Renfrew because shopping is a performance. Lower income people shop at discount stores because that's all they can afford. Middle income people shop online because they're struggling to keep up, and time is money.

Are people talking already about what might "take over" the soon-to-be-former Nordstrom's site? I still like it as the new Vancouver Art Gallery. Granted, the land is privately owned, but if a land trade could be arranged between Cadillac Fairview and the City of Vancouver, with CF getting Larwill Park, we'd get a new, perfectly positioned VAG at a fraction of the building cost, with enough left over to fund public programs and add to the collection.

But will people still be going to art galleries in ten years, to see art and partake in public programs? I wonder. Art galleries are not what they used to be, particularly for those under forty. Someone messaged CBC Radio this morning to suggest an art school; I messaged a prison, but that wasn't mentioned. That could be all there is in ten years: schools and prisons.