A little while back, CBC television ran a special about the problem of drug addiction in Vancouver’s tragic Downtown Eastside.  It’s a long piece, full of interviews, and hits all the sore spots and tired plot points that Vancouverites have become used to, and weary of, in the various narratives woven together to make sense of the city’s festering wound of urban blight: there’s the outrage over pharmacists in the area enabling the addicts and profiting from their miserable habits; there’s the interview with a sadly docile user, sorely ashamed of his situation, sharing pathetic anecdotes about petty crime and all-encompassing enslavement to the next fix; there’s the hard-boiled cop who has seen it all, gotten right up against the terrible scourge that the comfortable viewers at home can only dream of, seen the futility of the situation firsthand.

Though the piece was fairly well-executed, I suspect that the reporter, who spoke with a thick, foreign accent, doesn’t have much of a future, nor many prospects for climbing the ladder in the world of Vancouver journalism.  Not that I think the accent will hold him back, it’s just that he’s been dead for over ten years now, and besides, there’s not too many rungs left to climb on the ladder when you’re the doyen of lower mainland journalism, Jack Webster.  The piece on the “East End” drug problem was filed sixty years ago, and broadcast on the 13th of May, 1959.

I came across a link to the video on one of the city’s best – if frustratingly, though understandably, infrequently updated – blogs, Past Tense Vancouver (“fragments of Vancouver history and reflections thereon”).[1] The blog is maintained by an activist historian with whom I went to SFU, Lani Russwurm, who has – among other things – demolished the prevailing idea that dirty junkies and petty thieves tore a sweet little picket fence neighbourhood from the lily-white palms of functional Vancouver, what some have called the ‘dominant accounts [that] treat the buildings of Hastings Street as part of Vancouver’s historic entitlement, “stolen” by an urban underclass.’[2] Russwurm links to a 2008 piece in the Georgia Straight in which then-mayoral hopeful Peter Ladner, from one of Vancouver’s most distinguished, establishment families, calls for a return to the normalcy and the innocence captured in a famous, Fred Herzog photo called Hastings at Columbia, taken in 1958.  Russwurm runs the (haunting, vibrant, beautiful) photo on his blog, with the following caption: “Hastings at Columbia by Fred Herzog, 1958. At the time, this intersection was the epicentre of Canada’s largest drug scene.”[3] He then patiently outlines the actual history of the neighbourhood:

The Downtown Eastside has always been the centre of Vancouver’s hard drug trade. In fact, Canada’s first drug prohibition law originated here, introduced a century ago after Mackenzie King investigated compensation claims stemming from the 1907 anti-Asian riots in Chinatown and Japantown. Some of the claims happened to come from opium manufacturers and King became especially alarmed when he learned the opium scourge was spreading to white women and girls.[4]

He goes on to explain how the “drug scene never left this area,” citing a 1955 Maclean’s article whose title he borrows for the blog post – “ The Dope Craze That’s Terrorizing Vancouver” – and convincingly makes the case that the situation we see today is the result of the market being driven outdoors.

The distinction between indoors and outdoors is key to thinking about the Downtown Eastside.  We often comment on how frequently the building are used as backdrops for American films, but we rarely mention how we who live in the city tend to think of them as façades at even the best of times.  The glaring thing about the area is how everything happens outside, the sleeping, the socializing, the pandhandling, the fencing – and somehow, the only way to make the phrase ‘drug market’ seem more menacing is to qualify it as ‘open air’; two words that make a patio furniture set-up sound like heaven but make the sale and consumption of drugs sound like something from out of the Alternate 1985 in Back to the Future II.  Somehow, outside, the people in the downtown eastside are objects; inside, they can be subjects, because indoors is where people live and civilization happens, which is why it can be easier to wrap one’s head around the tragedy of destroying the Pantages Theatre on Hastings than the obscenity of handing out jaywalking tickets to people who can’t afford breakfast in the lead up to the Olympic Games.

That’s why one of the finest pieces of literature set in the neighbourhood, Timothy Taylor’s Story House, centres around the rediscovery of the neighbourhood’s interiors, specifically a dilapidated and mouldy piece of forgotten architecture.  The crude, commercial exploitation of the rediscovery – in the novel, a reality TV show, but one that works as a metaphor for myriad planning and real estate development initiatives – ends by destroying it.

The fight for interiors is also what made the Woodwards Squat of 2002 – also commemorated as Woodsquat – so revolutionary and transformative an experience.  All that fall, street people and activists occupied the massive, hulking Woodwards department store building, which had been vacant since 1993, and resisted the neo-liberal siege that was now literal, as well as metaphorical, for nearly 100 days.  The assertive beauty of the moment is fairly captured in this exchange between anti-poverty activist Reverend Davin and city housing manager Cameron Gray on December 12:

Cameron Gray: Hi.

Reverend Davin: Hi Cameron.

Cameron Gray: How are you?

Reverend Davin: I’m too stubborn to die.

Cameron Gray: [silence]

Reverend Davin: I’m one of the negotiators with the Woodwards Squat and the reason why I’m phoning you is because you’re the Housing Manager and I’m kind of wondering what it is you’re doing to get people housing.[5]

For those of us who supported the action, it was our turn to be outside looking in, as we did during many support rallies in the street outside the building.  The action became iconic – the following July, as a birthday gift from a friend, I was given a print-out artist Murray Bush’s hilarious, and yet somehow also touching, rendering of Queen Elizabeth II’s face photoshopped onto that of a squatter seated in an old chair, enjoying a smoke underneath a poster that says “We Will Win” (the Queen had made a visit to the city that October, while the squat was in full swing – Murray’s poster reads “Social Issues may not be your cup of tea but homelessness need to be dealt with effectively.  Demand provincially-funded housing for the poor, disabled and elderly.”)[6]

At one of the rallies for the squat, a huge ladder was leaned up against the side of the building, and those who cared to see inside were invited up.  Fat guys generally hate ladders, but as I negotiated it there were familiar faces, anti-poverty activists, at the top, and so I was able to persevere.  Inside, the building looked like an old hangar, cavernous and filthy and unwelcoming.  But the people inside were gathered in groups, large and small, some shooting the shit and making jokes, others taking votes and making decisions about the squat and its smaller, subsidiary actions.  In the same way as Michael Ignatieff recalls his revulsion at the British Coal Miners’ strike as the moment he realized firmly that he was a liberal and not a socialist, I remember that moment in the Woodsquat as precisely the opposite.  Unfortunately, it was a decisive event in splitting liberals from socialists at City Hall, too, as the newly-elected progressive city council dominated by Mayor Larry Campbell and COPE, began in-fighting over Campbell’s intention, quickly carried out, to send the cops in and evict the squatters.

In many ways, people in Vancouver talk about the Downtown Eastside the way that people throughout the Western world talk about Africa.  Some call for apolitical charity and aid; others call for armed intervention.  Everyone agrees that it’s a problem to be dealt, with filled with people who are their own worst enemies and whose lives are a mess.  In evaluating both cases, Africa and the DTES, the violence and misery that flows predictably from commercial and political decisions is chalked up to the irrationality, death drive, ignorance and indolence of their primary victims.  Just like Westerners are willing to lay the blame for the violent fall-out of their desire for cell phone batteries, diamonds, and oil on atavistic, dark continent tribalism, law enforcement and real estate developers and city planners are willing to credit the least powerful people in the city with somehow presenting it with its biggest obstacle:

That which now characterizes the neighbourhood – open drug markets, the deepening poverty and desperation, the run-down streetscape – are products of the same forces which induced the proliferation of condo towers, art galleries, restaurants, cafés, nightclubs, townhouses, heritage neighbourhoods, and inner city middle class consumers.  Zones of darkness and despair and zones of happy prosperity are parts of the same city.  The open drug market along Hastings Street appeared at precisely the same time that condos were being built around Gastown […] [7]

One way of thinking about the DTES as analogous to Africa which is rarely mentioned, but might be the most empowering, is as the cradle and fount of civilization; the knowing that, somewhere back along the line, we all come from there.  The community struck up around the Hastings Mill and “Gassy Jack” Deighton’s saloon – an area first called Gastown, then Granville, before its final christening in 1886 – is the nucleus of this city’s history.  Vancouver storytellers looking for a hard, narrative kernel indigenous to the city have worked its oldest neighbourhood to great and gritty effect in novels like Taylor’s Story House, or George Fetherling’s Jericho.  In the DVD City Reflections, in which Vancouver historians narrate the oldest filmed footage of Vancouver, a voiceover explains why a streetcar has to turn slightly, as trolley-buses still do today more than a century later, as it crosses Cambie on Hastings – entering the “Worst Block in Vancouver” discussed by Sommers and Blomley: this spot is where the grid of the original city, Granville/Gastown, meets up with the new one, the rest of Vancouver.  It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t Gastown that changed, introducing an aberration into the grid – it was the city around it.  And yet I can be almost certain that most people would be inclined to blame the slightly awkward on the Downtown Eastside.  Somehow, it must be their fault.

[1] http://pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com/

[2] Jeff Sommers and Nick Blomley, “The Worst Block in Vancouver,” Stan Douglas Every Building on 100 West Hastings Street, page 50.

[3] http://pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/%E2%80%9Cthe-dope-craze-that%E2%80%99s-terrorizing-vancouver%E2%80%9D/

[4] http://pasttensevancouver.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/%E2%80%9Cthe-dope-craze-that%E2%80%99s-terrorizing-vancouver%E2%80%9D/

[5] Transcript of Negotiations Discussion (12/12), Woodsquat, West Coast Line number 41, page 175

[6] Woodsquat, page 91

[7] Sommers and Blomley, page 53