VANCOUVER — East Van has had a bad rep for decades. It’s the poor side of town, a scary no-man’s land you steer clear of when the sun goes down.
Frankly, you get the feeling many people on the west side would rather live in Nanaimo than east of Main Street. But wait!
Rising rents and real-estate prices have pushed many people out of Kits and Point Grey and over to Main, Commercial and Strathcona.
Main Street has in fact become Vancouver’s main street, a vibrant strip humming with many of the city’s hippest new stores and restaurants. (Not the high-end, chi-chi places, but the most interesting ones.)
East Van’s coolest bar, the Waldorf, has been refurbished and reinvented as a hipster hangout. In tandem with the cheese mecca Les Amis du Fromage, it’s bringing life back to a long-dead part of Hastings.
Commercial Drive has been happening for years, an exotic blend of groovy restaurants and offbeat stores. Donald’s Market anchors a thriving shopping district around Hastings and Nanaimo.
In November more than 10,000 people trekked down to the Eastside Culture Crawl, a decade-old event where East Van’s many artists open up their studios to the public.
East Van even has its own icon, the giant East Van cross (Monument for East Vancouver) artist Ken Lum erected on the bluff at Clark Drive and Great Northern Way.
A shift in the public perception seems to be afoot. In many eyes, East Van has become the cool part of town, the cultural heart of Vancouver.
Lum says this is nothing new.
“East Van was always the cultural heart of the city,” says Lum, an internationally acclaimed artist who grew up in Strathcona and around Knight and Kingsway. “It was never a case of “˜becoming’ the cultural heart, unless I missed something about Dunbar or Quilchena becoming the cultural heart.”
To Lum, East Van’s working-class culture defines Vancouver’s “soul and spirit.”
“If you want to talk about the real soul of the city, it’s certainly the east side,” he states.
Urban planner Andy Yan agrees.
“We’re always in the search for authenticity, and I think the city moving east is a search for authenticity,” says Yan, who works for Bing Thom’s architecture firm.
Yan says 40 per cent of Vancouver’s population was born in another country, one of the highest percentages on the continent.
“We’re an immigrant city among two nations of immigrants,” he says.
“It produces all these hybrids and cultures that really can’t be found anywhere else. East Van is arguably the epicentre of this.
Yan has a theory: “If you’re in the field of urban planning or architecture, you should know the tastes of the city. It’s a critical aspect of understanding a neighbourhood and a city, in addition to what it looks like and how it feels.”
He puts his theory into practice by delving into East Van’s large and ever-changing crop of small, owner-operated restaurants. One of his favourites is Bo Laksa King Bubbles and Bits, run by Burmese immigrant Bo Han.
It has an odd location (across from London Drugs at 2546 East Hastings), its sign makes it look like a bubble tea house (which it does sell), and the bright décor would never fly in Yaletown.
But the food is fabulous and cheap. (Entrées are under $10.)
“Flavour-up-to-11 kind of food,” says Yan. “It’s an authentic commitment to the food traditions of Burma and Malaysia. [Han’s] laksa soup, to my understanding, has something like 25 or 30 different ingredients. Where other places create it out of a package, he actually makes it every night. That’s commitment for you.”
Joe Chaput runs Les Amis du Fromage with his wife, Alison, and her mother, Alice. It has outlets in Kitsilano and West Van, but two years ago they decided to go out on a limb and buy a building at 845 East Hastings.
“We found a concrete building that used to be a naval reserve, and it’s literally a bunker,” says Chaput, who lives nearby.
“It’s a great building, with plenty of room for Les Amis to grow. We had been looking for a long time. The Second Avenue store is maxed out, it can’t get a whole lot busier, it’s got no extra room. To have more room for storage and growth and a bigger store, it just made perfect sense to come down to this neighbourhood.
“The other parts of the city are so expensive I can’t afford to live there, I can’t afford to buy a house there,” says Chaput.
“[But] it’s achievable to have a home and a business in east Vancouver.”
Heritage expert John Atkin says the affordability of East Van opens the doors for small businesses priced out of the west side.
“You’ve seen the evolution of Fourth Avenue from funky little shops to chain stores,” he says.
“The rents start to go up, and some of these forgotten streets like Fraser or Main become the incubators for interesting places. The rents are low enough that you can actually take a chance and say, “˜Let’s open this and see what happens.’
“The evolution of Main Street has been quite extraordinary, and we’re starting to see that [spread] below Broadway to 2nd Avenue on Main. You’re seeing an inkling of that on Fraser, with some interesting shops starting to open up, people starting to feel their way over that way.
“That bodes well. It brings new vitality, and at the same time the process is slow enough that then you get [the older businesses] that make these streets interesting sticking around.”
Atkin gives walking tours all over the city, and is amused at the reaction of some people when he takes them deep into East Van.
“When I do the Fraser Street stroll from 25th up into the 40s, people are always jaws on the floor, going “˜Wow, this is such a nice neighbourhood!’” he recounts.
“Because they don’t think of it, they don’t get off Fraser, they don’t get off Main. There’s these neat little pockets in there. I think real estate on the other side of the city has pushed people out to look further afield.”
The Eastside Culture Crawl has played a big role in this. East Van has been the home of Vancouver’s artists and musicians for decades – it’s offered cheap rents, studio space, and a liberal attitude.
“The community is accepting of artists and what they’re doing, and their weird perception of the world,” says Valerie Arntzen, one of the founders of the Culture Crawl.
Arntzen is part of a group of six artists who bought an old house/factory in Strathcona that they use as both living and studio space. They bought 16 years ago, for $390,000, a steal by today’s standards. But Arntzen says her relatives weren’t all that enthusiastic about the neighbourhood when they came to visit.
“My mom was more accepting, but my aunt said, “˜Oh my God, what’s going on out there?’” she laughs. “She’s a little bit conservative.
“The community has cleaned up a lot, but it’s [still] not all flowers and picket fences.”
Realtor Bob Rennie has been telling people the city is going to move east for decades.
“It’s got nowhere else to go,” says Rennie, who jokes that he “was born in the rich part of East Van, Fifth and Nanaimo.”
He says the culture people are now discovering has been around for years, but went unrecognized.
“The west side is like America and the east side is like Canada,” he says.
“Everyone on the east side knew about the west side, but the west side did not know anything about the east side. I think a lot of people think it goes Cambie Street, and then the province of Alberta, and there is nothing in between.”
But times have changed.
“If you look at the diversity of Chinatown, the diversity of Commercial Drive, there’s great experiences. Look at Fraser Street or Main Street. There’s people visiting their grandchildren at 26th and Main that would never [have allowed] their children to go near that area.”
When they do venture west of Cambie, they find a very inviting part of the city.
“We all like what is accessible, and the east side has always been more accessible and more embracing to a broader sector of the population,” says Rennie.
“Where some people look down on the east side, there’s a comfort zone with that acceptance. And with that acceptance comes real cultural diversity. Look at the ethnicity, whether it’s the East Indian population at Fraser or the Asian population of Chinatown going into East Van, the Italian population of Commercial Drive, the alternative population of Commercial Drive.”
The eastward move of the city is going to continue. Emily Carr University is looking to move to a new location near Main on the False Creek flats, and developers are eyeing Hastings and Kingsway for condos.
“I did an article in 1988 in Vancouver Business magazine where I said W was the most expensive letter in the alphabet, referring to [the difference in price between] West 5th versus East 5th,” says Rennie.
“I said one day it will just be “˜Do you live in the city?’ And we’re pretty well there. Try to find a home for under $800,000 in East Vancouver.”
jmackie@vancouversun.com
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