Vancouver artist Stan Douglas reinterprets 1971 Gastown Riot
By Robin Laurence
Vancouver artist Stan Douglas reinterprets a violent street clash and the early days of the Downtown Eastside’s long decline
Stan Douglas (centre) directs the making of his mural Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971,
which shows the aftermath of a bloody confrontation between police and the counterculture.
Photo: Rosamond Borbury
An old guy with a bald head and grey beard is standing in the middle of the Woodward’s redevelopment. He’s smoking a cigarette and looking up at the huge photo mural on the glass wall that divides the site’s outdoor courtyard from its indoor atrium. “That’s not a scene that people in Vancouver want to remember,” he declares.
The mural, created by internationally renowned Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, reimagines aspects of the 1971 Gastown Riot. Also known as “the Battle of Maple Tree Square”, the riot occurred when city police violently broke up a peaceful, pot-smoking demonstration on Water Street. Douglas’s monumental work, which bears the title Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, shifts the action a couple of blocks away from the site of the “Smoke-In”, as the crowds are forcefully dispersed. It shows police officers in riot gear and on horseback in scenes of confrontation with hippie youth while uninvolved others look on…
Read the full article at straight.com.
To soar, yes – but also to get burned
by Lisa Rochon
The boom has slowed, but the pause is making room for some serious assessments of what it means to build with care
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Though architects in Canada managed to escape relatively unscathed while economic tumbleweeds blew through 2009, there were deep cuts south of the border. A state of paralysis still grips the American building industry…
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| The Woodward’s redevelopment in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which includes a 42-storey tower, could help heal the neighbourhood. Photo: Darryl Dick for The Globe and Mail. |
Walking the green talk
…Besides helping to ease the global climate crisis, sustainability in architecture should integrate place-making, a belief not only in individual buildings but the way that those buildings are aligned with their neighbourhoods. That’s why the Woodward’s redevelopment in British Columbia is a deeply optimistic gesture. It’s a series of buildings, including the just opened 42-storey ‘W’ tower, that combine to create an interesting neighbourhood. The $400-million project consists of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for the Contemporary Arts, a major grocery and drug store, small retail shops, and 200 social housing units. It’s a meaningful, eclectic mix that promises to be supported by its local, deeply-challenged neighbourhood for a long time. The tenacious vision by its makers – Vancouver architect Gregory Henriquez with private developer Westbank Projects/Peterson Investment Group and community adviser PHS Community Services – needs to be acknowledged…
Read the full article at theglobeandmail.com.
STIR is a step in the right direction
Decision on 1215 Bidwell shows that adding rental housing does not mean eliminating heritage
BY SHIRLEY CHAN | VANCOUVER SUN | DECEMBER 23, 2009
‘Tis the season . . . to give kudos to Vancouver City Council’s recent decision to approve the rezoning application for 1215 Bidwell Street. The proposed redevelopment, which falls under the City’s Short Term Incentives for Rental (STIR) Program, will see 49 much needed purpose-built rental housing units added to the West End’s rental housing stock and the preservation of a heritage facade at Davie and Bidwell.
The STIR program is designed to immediately increase the rental housing supply in Vancouver. And all parties involved in the 1215 Bidwell project–including Henriquez Partners Architects, Millenium Corporation, and the City of Vancouver–deserve accolades for being part of the solution to Vancouver’s current rental housing crisis…
Read the full article at vancouversun.com.
Vancouver downtown east side slowly crawls toward gentrification
Brian Hutchinson in Vancouver, National Post
Published: Friday, December 18, 2009
The Woodward’s building in Vancouver’s downtown east-side when it opened in 1903.
The building is being transformed into a modern mixed-use facility meant to improve
one of the city’s most poverty…[Photo: Archive]
Architect Gregory Henriquez looks out his office window and describes the scene two blocks away, in Canada’s most infamous neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside.
“What I see are construction workers and a few drug dealers,” he says. Men and women shoving tiny bags of poison into pockets. Other men and women in hardhats and work boots, operating heavy equipment, redirecting traffic, building things. It’s quite a dichotomy, and something we have all become accustomed to seeing of late in the DTES, Canada’s original skid row.
The drug pushers are now hugely outnumbered. Slowly, surely, the dreaded DTES is being transformed, from a ghetto infested with crime, drugs and disease, to a mixed ghetto and gentrified condo zone…
Read the full article at nationalpost.com.
Aisles be back: Life then and now at Woodward’s
FRANCES BULA
VANCOUVER — Special to The Globe and Mail
Crowds around Woodward’s 60th anniversary window display, June 14, 1952. Dominion Photo Co. VPL-28783.
1963
My mother packed up her four kids and got on a train with us to Vancouver, leaving behind Regina and a bad marriage. We ended up living in North Vancouver, but when we did serious shopping, we came downtown to two stores: Woodward’s and Army & Navy. The Bay was for rich people and, for sure, we weren’t rich. But that was fine. Woodward’s, a Bunyanesque store that covered most of a block, had everything. Hastings was a busy street, filled with interesting stores. And we felt like we fit in there.
2009
I park my car kitty-corner from the new Woodward’s complex. It’s too early and too cold for the drug dealers to be working the corner of Abbott the way they normally do on this street of abandoned buildings. But there are a surprising number of people walking around here this morning, and they’re heading toward Woodward’s, now a complex of two condo towers, the small original 1903 department-store building, a London Drugs that opened on the weekend, and Simon Fraser University’s new contemporary arts base…
Read the full article at theglobeandmail.com.
