The Tipper

The Tipper is a greasy spoon located on Kingsway, a couple of shops east of Victoria on the south side. Its interior is darkly-lit (an oxymoron?), and is made up of black-padded booths and chocolate-coloured wainscoting. If you're sitting near the window you can see the mountains of the Sechelt Peninsula.

Breakfasts at the Tipper are traditional meals, reasonably-priced, but I wouldn't want to eat there too often. No more than once a month.

Decorating the Tipper's small waiting area are drawings that at first look like they were made by children, but occasionally include those made by grown ups. The best of these drawings (not sure how that's decided, though I doubt it's a peer-review process) are tucked into the restaurant's clear plastic menu sleeves.

A menu that caught my eye last Saturday featured a drawing by Bob. I asked our server, the wry-smiling Slavic-eyed one, if she knows Bob, and she said, "Oh yeah, he just started taking lessons. Oh yeah, I know Bob."

Wood From the People

This Thursday's forecast shows an overnight low of minus-six, so we're not totally done with winter. That said, the truck that picks up our unused firewood was at Kingsway and East 16th last Wednesday, with a couple of cords in tow. Some of this wood will be turned into paper. Some of this paper will hold printed images.

Copper Miner

The composer of this sculpture does not consider himself to be a composer or a sculptor but someone who, he tells me, has "a sixth sense for what's coming down," and when it does, "there's always good stuff to be found," like the copper he mined from a nearby demolition bin. 

"Twice people called the cops on me," he said, adjusting his haul to fit a second device (a more-recent version of the Radio Flyer wagon). "They thought I stole this container, but I didn't; it's the one that goes with my house. It's mine."

I asked if the police showed up, and he told me, "They did, but they just laughed." And he laughed too. 

The miner said it would take a couple hours for him to clean up the copper, and that he could get a couple hundred bucks for it. When I asked if his "sixth sense" applied to anything else, he thought for a moment, before shrugging, "No, not so far."

Hail Fire

Walking down the 1200 block of Kingsway on the north side heading northwest. At the halfway point you can look right down the throat of East 21st. On Wednesday it beckoned. A fire in the belly. A campfire.

This was later in the afternoon, usually a busy time on the roads. A sudden lull on Kingsway said Yes, go for it! So I leapt onto the street, jumped the median and entered a cathedral.

From Inverness west to Glen. Walking until the houses blocked the sun, then a couple steps back to sun again. But only for a minute. Another step back, then another, until I could no longer stand to see the sun extinguished. 

Release the Kraken

Christened Kingsway in October, 1913, this eight mile thoroughfare came to life as a colonial endeavour after WWII, when most everyone could afford a car. Except Mother Nature, who is now punishing us for having them. Not just cars, but car dealerships, automotive repair shops, drive-thru restaurants, motels. Cars continue along Kingsway, though much of what attends to them is in decline.

Pictured up top is the back end of one of the few repair shops left between Fraser and Nanaimo Streets. We've all seen these stackings of car bumpers before, and if you mention the name of the artist whose work they remind you of, I'll mention a couple more and insist you curate the show. Or at least title the piece.

What to call something like this? We see the figure, but only a portion of it. A sea monster sticking its head out of the water, begging us to slow down?

House of Dosas

Since the mid 1990s, the House of Dosas has been at the northwest corner of Kingsway and Knight (prior to that, the restaurant was a 50s-era greasy spoon). There are now two dosa restaurants on the 1300 block of Kingsway, and a third in the next block west. I recommend the dosas to those I take to these restaurants, though my favourite meal at the Sri Lankan-run House of Dosas is the curry (medium-hot), which I have with lamb, raita, naan and papadam.

House of Dosas is another Kingsway space whose shape is determined by the street's angular relationship to the grid, which was imposed after contact (prior to that, Kingsway was as it lay: a narrow path pounded out by deer and those who stalked them). House of Dosas has seven windows, five of which can be seen in the picture above. The fourth window from the left faces east and provides a view of the (diagonal) rise to Dumfries. That's the movie I watch when dining alone: cars and their departure.

Invisibility Under Threat of Erasure

On January 22th the Vancouver Sun published (online) a 1500 word Page Four article by John Mackie called "Old Kingsway Versus New". The inspiration for the piece appears to be Heritage Vancouver's recent addition of Kingsway (the entire 8-mile stretch of it, from 7th and Main in Vancouver to the Burnaby/New Westminster border) to its Top 10 endangered heritage sites.

Nice to see the word "heritage" extend beyond the Edwardian to include semi-feudal, post-war immigrant working class racialized neighbourhoods like Kingsway. Not so nice to see Kingsway once again defined by what it is not, as evidenced by Mackie's don't-think-of-a-purple-pony lede: "Kingsway will never be confused with the Champs Elysees in Paris or Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles." Also, what happened to the Sun's fact checkers? It's New Sam Po Meat & BBQ, not New Samo Meat & BBQ.

SFU's Andy Yan is quoted at length throughout the article. He talks of "the invisible manufacturing that goes on" along Kingsway, particularly in the food industry and "in terms of  ... production, distribution and repair elements." And later, how that production is "in danger of being systematically erased," how this "erasure is stemming from its invisibility" (great line!).

Mackie's Strathcona neighbour and Vancouver Councillor Pete Fry concludes the article with his amendment to the recent 1265 Kingsway development proposal that has the new building's retail floor plate sectioned into smaller spaces, as opposed to a single unit. Would that discourage private developers from the common practice of writing off the loss of (deliberately) un-leased premium priced ground level retail spaces for the first three years after the completion of what is largely a market housing project? No. That's another article that is not in any rush to be written, one that begins: "Vancouver will never be mistaken for a city that puts public housing before private profit."

Laneway Housing

On a walk I take: east on 19th through Tyee School up the hill, right on Fleming, left on 20th past Commercial Street, past the next street east, then a right up the lane to 21st, cross at the light to the lane just east of Victoria, then a right up the lane to where it bends left at the McDonald's, the lane just north of Kingsway, in the block before Gladstone.

Lamppost Watches Power Lines

Tuesday was the heaviest rain day this week, but it stopped around four.

Layered up, I set out for my walk. East or west?

East.

At the end of the block, north or south?

South.

At Kingsway the clouds parted. I lifted my head and the sun touched my face before setting.

Road Near New Westminster

While scrolling through the Ormsby Review I came upon a supplementary image (above) provided by the magazine's editor Richard Mackie of a circa 1884 engraving by the Marquis of Lorne (1845-1914).

Entitled Road Near New Westminster, the engraving was first published in the Marquis's Canadian Pictures (1885) and is a rare view of the former pre-contact Coast Salish footpath that was widened by the Royal Engineers in 1865 when New Westminster officials feared the city was at risk of a Fenian invasion. 

To this day it is unclear whether the road was intended to allow British Navy soldiers an overland route to defend the city (the Fraser River was too shallow for Navy ships), or allow its residents an exit. 

At one point this road featured some of the largest Douglas firs ever seen in the Lower Mainland, the last of which were cut down to make way for that post-WWII innovation known as the used car lot.

The road has had many names since it was first widened, but we know it today as Kingsway.

Morning Walk

Getting up earlier than usual (6am), walking earlier than usual (9am), and for longer.

Yesterday I walked east on Kingsway and noticed another Pattison billboard that wasn't trying to sell me something. Could it be that no one wanted to rent it, and that rather than leave it blank, Pattison mounted a reproduced artwork instead? Something from his collection? Is Pattison trying to "sell" us on his collection? (Does he have a Ryman?) As an art critic I am prepared to respond. But not today.

I never know where I am going when I set out east on Kingsway, until I come to Victoria. At that point it's either further east (I have walked to Metrotown) or south. This time I walked south, but not for long. I turned right (west) at East 30th because I noticed that nothing seemed to impede it, that it ran without interruption until Knight Street. (Most east-west avenues between Victoria and Knight are blocked at some point by north-south streets.)

What I like about 30th, what I learned yesterday, is that some of its blocks are curbed and look to be regularly paved, while others look like back alleys. Street, alley, street, alley. Unusual for this city.

In one alley a cardboard box of electronic trash, including an old dial-up modem. Ba-ding, ba-ding, ba-ding! I would have taken its picture but I was being watched by a couple of guys in a car watching a guy in his backyard polishing his motorcycle, and he was watching me too.

Ah, the early days of the internet (1990s), when its web was a bunch of cute kids prone to snits; before its teenage years, when it knew everything (2000s); and now today, its social media platforms like battle stations people run to when feeling upset or righteous or both. Things were getting hairy online before the COVID-19 virus, and some reacted by going off of it. If I was the internet I could not think of a better way to return people to its rooms than the conditions set by this virus. I don't hear many people speaking of things going viral now that this virus -- and those managing it -- have us locked in, strapped down.

At Dumfries Street I turned right again and walked north. There is a brand new house on the northwest corner (Vina palatial, made of stucco and veneers), but it was the two war houses north of it that caught my eye. Both fall gently down a verdant slope and have lush, thoughtful gardens. With the sun on them, they look perfect. Find them, spend time with them. They might make you feel better.

AA Furniture & Appliance

My new rule is three hours (per day) with the computer on, with maybe an hour in the late afternoon, but that's it. If I want to watch "TV", it's a DVD player hooked up to a monitor (I don't have basic cable). My afternoon walks are based on DVD availability, and I know all the shops. One of them is AA Furniture & Appliance, whose owner, Lee, is celebrating her fortieth year in Canada after emigrating from Malaysia.

Lee had a new box of DVDs in back, but I had to help her dig it out. This wall of recent acquisitions was not the orderly wall of boxes you see at Best Buy, but a blend of boxes supporting (or supported by) overstuffed black garbage bags, ironing boards, plastic tubs, lampshades, ottomans ... One false move and the whole thing could come crashing down!

The DVDs were priced at a dollar each, and that included multi-volume sets. I purchased The Sopranos first season (never seen it), a Leo DiCaprio triple feature (I have seen The Beach, but not his Man in the Iron Mask or Romeo & Juliette), Dances With Wolves (never seen it), X-Men (saw it during its theatrical release), Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (never seen it), Behind Enemy Lines (seen parts of it three times on airplanes), Terminator 2 (theatrical release), Traffic (never seen it), The Day the Earth Stood Still (turns out the Keanu Reeves remake had the original in its box as well), Lord of War (about the rise and fall of a Ukranian-American arms dealer) and the film I watched the other night, Jurassic Park: the Lost World.

I had seen the first Jurassic Park in a theatre. Apart from its special effects, I was not particularly wowed by it. As for the sequel, it's like there are two movies going on at once -- one beholden to the script, the other to the odd energies of Jeff Goldblum, who has what Warren Beatty has in mutter and movement, but is unable to meld. The only time I have seen Goldblum in a role that suited his style was when he played the lead in David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly (Geena Davis: "What does the disease want?" Goldblum: "It wants to turn me into something else"). His and Cyndi Lauper's Vibes (1988) is quite possibly the worst (bad-bad) film I have ever seen.

At bottom is my favourite "scene" in Lost World. We're near the end of the film, when the adult tyrannosaurus rex is ravaging San Diego in search of its kid. People take shelter in a Blockbuster store, where one of the movie posters has Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of King Lear.

"I sat on the rug..."

The south(-west) side of Kingsway, the bend between 12th Avenue and Fraser. Behind the sign, a sample. A rug. One rug. Like the sign says: RUG.

In 1965 the Beatles wrote and performed a song ("Norwegian Wood") with a rug in it (first line, second verse). Note John's emphasis on the vowel ("u"), the glue he dabs on it, tapping his brush on the consonant ("g").

Secret Theatre

Last month Secret Beauty Supply (1339 Kingsway) used purple and white paint to bring "new life" to an art deco theatre.

This is what the other side of the street looked like when the theatre was being built:

Store Front

Yesterday's walk. East on Kingsway. The 2100 block, north side. What remains of Kimmy's Hair Salon. The view above looks east; the view below looks west.

A beam poking out, once proud, now rotten, sagging. Like the Brain Bug at the end of Starship Troopers (1997). I touched its wrinkled surface -- but felt nothing.

Housing

Walking back from Famous Foods I saw these birdhouses outside the second-hand store on the south side of the 1300 block of Kingsway. While taking their picture the proprietor came out and asked me which one I wanted. Before I could answer she said, "Both, right?" And before I could answer that she asked again and I pointed to the saloon.

"Eight dollars," she said.

I asked about the other one.

"Five dollars," she said. "Less work."

A beat.

"I give you both for fourteen dollars."

Another beat.

"How much is [the saloon] again?"

"Nine dollars."

"Will you take eight?"

"Eight-fifty."

"I'll give you eight."

She laughs. "Okay, eight!"

Gladstone Street

Last week Hannah and I drove southeast on Kingsway to New Westminster where we walked up and down Columbia Street, poked around the antique shops along the waterfront before a quick visit to the New Media Gallery at the Anvil Centre.

On our return we stopped at the Oasis Car Wash in Burnaby; and then, as we were nearing Gladstone  Street, I remembered that the City of Vancouver recently posted a "Literary Landmark" plaque to commemorate my book Kingsway (1995) and its mention of Kingsway's first settler-built structure, the Gladstone Inn, in 1865.

The two dots placed below my eyes are remnants of what Hannah said were "likely googly eyes." She tried to pick them off, but they were on there pretty good.

List #2

The imposition of the modern grid made Vancouver's first road a diagonal road, an irrational road, a subject of scorn.

The image above is my attempt at a representation. It appears in its complete form on Page 17 of  Kingsway.

Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

At the northwest corner of Kingsway and Clark Drive is Vancity Medicinals, the latest in what are now ten medical marijuana dispensaries in the eight blocks between Perry and Fraser Streets.

Why so many dispensaries in such a small area? I asked a nearby business owner, who promptly told me what a friend who works for the City told him: that our neighbourhood is known for its apathy, and that attempts to open businesses like these in other parts of the city have been met with petitions and trips to city hall.

So how do these businesses work? To which he said, They work because the City has made anything to do with marijuana (short of a grow-op) a low priority. From there he added that many of these sites do not have a business licence, and that they operate through non-profit status, where once people are prescribed marijuana for their pain, they go to these dispensaries, become members, and purchase their medication.

Last week, while passing Vancity Medicinals, I noticed a sandwich board that read:

Doctor's Clinic Mondays
4:30pm - 6:30pm
Walk-ins Welcome
Appointments Preferred.

But there was another sign. Six just like it, to be exact:

Warning
24 Hours
Surveillance
In Use.

Are these joints targets for break-ins? I asked the nearby business owner. To which he smiled and said: Think about it. Ten dispensaries within eight blocks of each other? You have to think that at least one of them might feel the need to assert a little elbow room.