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Click the images on the left for four views of each drawing in a new window.
THE CLASSICAL JOINT
This is the land of is, for those who knew it. 231 Carrall Street: 'the classical joint COFFEE HOUSE.' Once in our common midst, now long-gone on to a higher plane...a world-class act time-capsule that passes through our social lens like some smoky, sweet memory. So very unique, subdued, dignified, a breed of behavior. Moments of perfect human imperfection. Through the uncertain pitches of the '60s comes along a well-tuned note...and it all plays out for a while. A nonce. Something that exists in the moment. A hybrid wandering vine from a cobbled backstreet of Amsterdam via Greenwich...the joint is a west-coast outpost for a certain intellectual bohemia to roost for a spell. Leftcoast....
THE BLUE EAGLE CAFÉ
130 East Hastings Street. Origin 1944. A walk down the crooked road...the anything goes street is a river of those sweet and sour odours of the bitters and the blues. A gathering of forlorn and deflected actors, pepper and glass eyes, flinted faces. Jackals of empty teeth there.
This is the tragic street. The broken open one. Social sluicebox. We are near the crossroads of an arrangement called Hell. The corner of twist and spin. Main and Hastings; the last stage. Here you will see Jack Straw burning, Jim Crow with broken wings, and Joe Blow taking a nose-dive...
THE MARINE VIEW CAFÉ
Now, just an empty hole in the shoreline...an ecological shadow. Wire-fenced-in by Vancouver Port Corporation. A spent wharf, shutdown 1989. Moved out in October, demolished in December. A hollow. Plucked. A shuffled away historical specimen. Not much aftermath. An industry eclipsed. Circling gulls call is that all? United Grain Growers concrete silos look and lurk, seemingly unclothed by its absence. A tug nosing a renegade log boom. A single train bell at the crossing is melancholy - a rubble and tangle of leftovers and memories...
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