An Urban Palimpsest
Woodwards and Canada’s Poorest Postal Code
Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood has long been plagued by poverty, disease and addiction. As new development improves the area, the poor are pushed from their homes and community. At the centre of this transformation sits Woodwards: once a department store, now a housing and community hub. Excavating the urban layers puts the current conflict in context — and shows the possibility for inclusive development. This is the third in a four part series exploring the history of the Downtown Eastside through the lens of a single property. Get the rest of the story here: part one, part two, part four.
Never Again
In 2002, activists and homeless people pried boards off a second floor window of Woodwards, and began a squat that would last three months. Framing the squat as the spiritual legacy of the highway resistance movement of the 1970s gave weight to the activist’s demands. According to Judy Graves, the city’s Coordinator of the Tenant Assistance Program, the feeling at the Woodsquat—as it became known—was, “‘Never again, we will fight anybody or anything.’ And because they didn’t have a degree of power, and never would, they fought with their bodies.”
The squat began when advocates for the low-income community (in Judy’s words, shit-kicking radicals), along with a number of homeless people, broke in to the vacant Woodwards and occupied the building for a week. When the occupation was violently broken up by police in riot gear on its sixth day, protests mounted and people began squatting on the sidewalk outside the vacant building.
The city couldn’t send the police back or they would have a riot on their hands, and so they turned to Graves. As the conduit between government and the homeless, both sides relied on Graves to communicate. For three months, she would begin at one end of the squat and spend her mornings going in and out of tents, speaking to people.
The drama of the Woodsquat drew public attention from the rest of the city. The ongoing crisis seriously dented the popularity of the ruling NPA, and in November 2002 they were soundly defeated by the left-leaning Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE). COPE acted quickly to resolve the Woodsquat dispute, and in December of that year 54 people were moved into Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels with rents subsidized to the welfare rate by the city.
The layers of the urban palimpsest are inscribed by the actions of people, and in turn these layers influence action. Reading the palimpsest, however, is a different matter. Looking through history at the layers of development and social dynamics, different groups pull out different messages. The meaning of space is not static: it is contested.
Coffee and History, part 2
To hear the story of the Woodsquat, and the meaning behind it, I arrive at another JJ Bean coffee shop in a different part of the city a few weeks after speaking with John Atkin. My companion this time is Judy Graves, the city’s recently retired advocate for the homeless. Over the past three decades, Graves carved her own niche in the city bureaucracy. Sitting across from me in a high-backed, curved white chair, her calm demeanor puts me instantly at ease. Although she has spent her career listening to unimaginably tragic stories, the lines around Graves’ eyes and mouth are from smiling. In her puffy grey winter jacket she speaks softly, telling me about her years of experience working the streets of Vancouver.
Graves first entered the public spotlight in the 1990s, when she began to notice more people sleeping in the streets. Like a detective following clues, she walked Vancouver’s streets in the dead of night, speaking with the people she found sleeping outside. These conversations followed a pattern, and she discovered that a recent change in welfare policy had made it more difficult for people to remain on government assistance.
Graves refers to the people she met in doorways and under bridges as “my professors, my priests, and my rabbis.” As a young woman, Graves dropped out of highschool. The teachings of her professors, priests and rabbis are now vindicated with three honorary degrees from three different universities.
But the origins of the Woodsquat lie under a deeper layer of the urban palimpsest. When activists and the homeless stood together with raised fists on the parapet of Woodward’s and shouted “never again,” they were referring to more than a history of displacement. The older residents of the neighbourhood involved with the squat were survivors of an AIDS crisis that ripped through the alleys and small SRO hotels of the Downtown Eastside for over a decade.
Enter Crack-Cocaine
By the early 1980s the glory days of the North American department store were fading in the rearview. There was a palpable feeling of decay in Woodwards once popular flagship location. According to John Atkin, “You could walk into the store and you knew they were dying. It just had that kind of sadness to everything, and people intuitively picked up on it. You knew it wasn’t going to be around for a while.”
Woodwards finally succumbed in 1993, shortly after the stores 100th anniversary, and assets were sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Store locations were converted to either Bays or Zellers. The flagship downtown location remained empty, however, as the surrounding neighbourhood entered a period of intense deterioration.
When Woodwards’ doors were locked and the windows boarded up, other businesses in the area disappeared almost overnight. As the economic keystone of the neighbourhood, Woodward’s disappearance was a blow the local retail scene could not support. As the phrase goes, nature abhors a vacuum, and the burgeoning drug trade rushed into the alleys and boarded up doorways of Hastings Street.
You go up, and then you come down. The high was so cool the first time, and you want to get back there. But you can’t, because you need more of it and you need it more frequently.
Illicit drugs have always played a major role in the social dynamics of Vancouver, beginning with the opium trade through Chinatown in the first decades of the 20th century. In 1970, the LeDain Commission estimated there were 4000 heroin addicts in Canada. Sixty-two percent of these were in British Columbia, the vast majority in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the 2000s, Vancouver drug users converted from heroin to crack-cocaine on a large-scale. In 1996, less than five percent of injection drug users reported smoking crack-cocaine daily. By 2007, daily crack users had increased to over 40 percent of the injection drug using population. Parallel to this increase, the percentage of users reporting daily heroin use fell from above 30 to just 20 percent over the same time period.
Regular use of heroin is a debilitating addiction, but it does not have the erratic effects of crack. Compared to heroin, crack-cocaine gives a very short-lived high, and gives the user an intense boost in energy. In the words of John Atkin, “You go up, and then you come down. The high was so cool the first time, and you want to get back there. But you can’t, because you need more of it and you need it more frequently.”
On top of this, crack was incredibly cheap in the early 90s, with a single rock going for as little as four or five dollars. All of a sudden, a car radio or the change sitting in a car’s center console was valuable enough to be traded for a crack high. Overlapping the mass conversion in drug use, petty theft and car break-ins increased in the neighbourhood.
Visible, obvious drug users and petty crime quickly gave the DTES the reputation of a place to avoid at all cost, and the local economy stagnated. But this story of retail flight and exploding drug use is only one of the narratives used to define the Downtown Eastside through the 80s and 90s.
Poor but Proud
Paralleling changes in drug use and street activity, organizations in the neighbourhood had been working tirelessly to rebrand the area. With its cheap hotels and beer parlors, Vancouver’s middle class had for decades known the neighbourhood around Woodward’s as Skid Road. In 1973 the Downtown Eastside Resident’s Association (DERA) hired a retired ironworker named Bruce Eriksen as an organizer. Described as a rangy, fierce-eyed, intense, angry man obsessed with the injustice he saw in the DTES, Eriksen would spearhead the battle to change public perception of the area.
Eriksen typified the image of the Downtown Eastside endorsed by DERA. Fleeing an orphanage at the age of fourteen, he eventually arrived in Vancouver. For sixteen years he lived hand to mouth, working odd jobs and drinking away his paychecks in the beer parlors of Skid Road. After a police officer told him that he was killing himself, Eriksen checked into a sanitarium where he stayed for three months and left sober. A brother got him a job as an ironworker, a trade he pursued until hurting his back working on the Knight Street Bridge. Unemployed, now injured, and living on Skid Road, Eriksen was hired by the People’s Aid Project to advocate for the community.
As Sandy Cameron has written in his book about the Carnegie Community Center, “[Eriksen] was working class, part of that group of men and women in British Columbia who worked in resource and attendant industries. They had to contend with company towns and a company province, and they organized militant unions for self-protection. They were independent, feisty, adventurous people with a strong sense of fairness. They were the ones who built British Columbia, and many of them made their homes in the Downtown Eastside.”
The new narrative offered by Erisken and DERA demanded respect from the city for a class of people who perhaps were hard drinking and poor, but had built the province on their strong backs. At one of DERA’s first resident meetings Harry O’Laskey said, “Too many people think of the skid road area as being full of drunken bums and drug addicts. It isn’t. Most of us are honest, and just looking for the right thing to do.”
Frustrated with the media continually portraying his neighbourhood as Skid Road, Eriksen once famously retorted, “The people who live here, they call it the Downtown Eastside.” The name stuck, and with it a new narrative of the history of the neighbourhood.
As I talk about it, I can feel my lips and my hands are vibrating… there’s electricity in it
A change in name and image was accompanied by a number of concrete victories for DERA. Eriksen spearheaded the closure of a provincial liquor store at Main and Hastings that people claimed was fostering alcoholism. Liquor laws in beer parlors that continually over served patrons before throwing them into the street were enforced. DERA undertook an effort to have sprinkler systems installed in SRO rooms, and fire escapes were repaired. In a drawn out battle with commercial interests, the historic Carnegie Library building was eventually secured as a community center.
Dated April 25, 1973, a letter written by Eriksen arrived on the desk of Mayor Art Phillips. In part the letter read, “The people of Vancouver have heard enough talk from wealthy politicians and jingoistic bureaucrats about decent housing. Now’s the time to evict the cockroaches and rats, to turn on the water at hotels where they turn it off at night, to restrain the landlords who give only five days notice of rental increases, to turn on the furnaces and light up the dank hallways. The new City Administration claims to be for people. We’ll see.” The internal fire and conviction of Eriksen, accompanied by a change in public perception of the Downtown Eastside, would go a long way to seeing many of these demands become victories.
There’s Electricity In It
DERA’s rebranding of the neighbourhood galvanized public support for local initiatives. It also created a division in the neighbourhood. The vision pushed by DERA effectively differentiated between the hardworking and deserving poor, and the undeserving injection drug addicts. This distinction would have profound impacts as Woodwards closed and the drug market exploded in the neighbourhood.
In 2000, 28 percent of the Downtown Eastside’s estimated 16,275 residents were injection drug users. Compare that to the overall Canadian adult average from 2004, 3 percent of whom reported using any of cocaine or crack, speed, hallucinogens, ecstasy, or heroin in the past year.
Today, the city focuses on harm reduction strategies to deal with the health consequences of drug use. In the 1990s, police enforcement was the method of choice. In an environment hostile to drug users and drug use, clean injection rigs were hard to come by. In the back alleys off Main Street, and in small SRO rooms, people shared needles.
In 1994, the B.C. Centre for Disease Control reported an epidemic of HIV infection among injection drug users in the province, predominantly spread through the sharing of needles. A majority of these infections were in the Downtown Eastside, where many people also tested positive for hepatitis-C.
Working at the Vancouver Native Health Clinic in the neighbourhood, Lou Demerais remembers the feeling of absolute hopelessness as the disease spread. “We used to sit around and console ourselves. Many of us thought we could empathize with people from African countries, because there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.”
Judy Graves leans back in her chair and puts her fingers to her lips as she remembers the 1990s. With just a slight quiver in her voice, she tells me about working through that decade. “As I talk about it, I can feel my lips and my hands are vibrating… there’s electricity in it.” There was a point at the height of the epidemic, Graves remembers, when she wouldn’t bother bringing a lunch to work because she was spending every one of her breaks at memorial services for friends or acquaintances who had passed on.
As city health authorities gathered resources to investigate the epidemic, narratives constructed to defend the community began to create roadblocks. The Downtown Eastside is a layer cake of intertwined communities, a fact the newly dominant narrative of a residential neighbourhood inhabited by poor resource workers could not acknowledge.
Writing on the place of addicts in the neighbourhood, Dr. Jeffrey D. Sommers’ dissertation concludes, “The presence of such people is blamed for the general decline of the neighbourhood from an earlier, apparently more benign state of affairs when it was the site of a poor, hard-drinking, but also hard-working community of loggers and other resource industry workers.”
The Best Laid Plans
DERA’s narrative forced a level of respect from civic authorities, and achieved concrete improvements for the area, but it also secluded and stigmatized a large and struggling subset of the population. As Graves recalls, “Actually some of the major agencies in the DTES were the blockage to getting AIDs research going… they didn’t want outside institutions in the neighbourhood, they didn’t want to lose power, and they didn’t want to acknowledge that this epidemic was happening. They resisted research when it came in, they shot it in the foot, and so it took a while to get going.”
DERA’s connection to a past of hardworking resource men and women won many victories for the neighbourhood, and also had very real and negative consequences for those living with addiction and HIV.
The Woodwards occupation was thus more than a stand for social housing; it was a desperate backlash against the horrors of the 1990s. Speaking about the older members of the Woodsquat, Graves says, “They saw many friends die. I don’t think there’s a single one of them who couldn’t honestly talk about waking up beside their lover or friend and finding them dead in the morning.” The struggle to define the future of Woodwards, then, was literally a struggle for life or death.
Remembered through the dark lens of the 1990s, Woodwards takes on a rosy hue of community belonging. Late city councilor and long time community advocate Jim Green once reminisced, “It was a place where [local seniors] could meet their friends and have a coffee. In those days — this was before ATMs — they cashed cheques. You could buy everything from pants to gardening supplies.”
The tragedy of the 1990s changed Woodwards into more than a symbol of past retail vibrancy on Hastings Street. The once privately owned space took on a community meaning, attached to the fond memories of longtime neighbourhood residents.
Judy Graves smiles, as she agrees with Green’s sentiment. “Woodwards had tremendous meaning for everyone involved with the squat,” she says. “It was where your grandmother and your mother had shopped, where you bought your groceries or met your friends for coffee. It was where you sat on Santa’s lap when you were a kid.” These narratives of shared community, and lost innocence, in the Woodwards space were contrasted with the misery, disease and cramped living conditions of the Downtown Eastside. While the block-size building sat empty and decrepit for a decade, the obvious solution for people in the Downtown Eastside was to develop the property for community uses.
To be continued…
Get the rest of the story here: part one, part two, part four.
