vancouver: loving the city, on plywood

This isn't about transit, but it's about loving the city.  For the holiday weekend, some selections from the plywood that still covers storefronts broken in Vancouver's 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. These are from the Chapters bookstore at Robson & Howe.

P1090532
P1090534 P1090531

5 Responses to vancouver: loving the city, on plywood

  1. Danny July 2, 2011 at 5:16 pm #

    Beautiful. I can’t even imagine how much this means to the owner.

  2. Brent Palmer July 3, 2011 at 10:41 am #

    Wow. I don’t think there was something like that after the Conulla Riots in 2005.

  3. Wad July 3, 2011 at 8:41 pm #

    Life-affirming graffiti? Wow.

  4. GD July 4, 2011 at 6:06 am #

    Life-affirming, proud, city-loving street art is actually quite common. That said, it is a pretty beautiful sight, and an interesting dynamic.
    What’s interesting about the post-riot reaction is some of the intellectual meta-guilt, e.g. this little essay:
    http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/06/24/RealVancouver/
    personally, though, I feel that this critique goes one (or several) bridge(s) too far. Vancouverites showed that they cared about what happens downtown. I don’t care about their motives, the sight is pretty amazing.

  5. MB July 11, 2011 at 11:00 am #

    I agree with GD. The Tyee piece went too far by using the riot as a convenient fulcrum to attempt to deconstruct Vancouver’s established political economy. It promotes some rather facile anti-establishment sterotypes.
    What does the tragedy of the Downtown Eastside have to do with a riot and the over reaction to “world class” city monikers? Will the author and the Tyee be the first to promote building a great wall around the DTES to keep the movement of the poor, addicted and homeless out? Or will they promote building homes and providing services in other cities who are clearly not doing their share?
    135 people were charged a week after the riots, not one of them from the city. How do hordes of rage-filled, alcohol-fueled immature youth from the suburbs add up to “ordinary citizens” from Vancouver?
    A short while ago Vancouver was dubbed a “no fun” city because it was tired of cleaning up the mess after regional events with hundreds of thousands of people ikn attendance that Vancouver is always expected to host.
    Well, why should less than 600,000 people out of a Metro population of 2.4 million support a billion dollar annual budget (orders of magnitude higher on a per capita basis than any of the other budgets from the 21 cities in the Metro) that is high partly because it is the only city that pays the price for acting as the regional gathering place? It is unfair.
    And it’s patently unfair for the Tyee to use a riot of all things to merely score a few cheap and easy points that are nothing more than a lazy commentary from a plush armchair. Where is the investigative journalism into the regional imbalance between Vancouver and the other cities in the Lower Mainland?