Vancouver Magazine
Care to travel the world, one plate at time? Visit Kamloops.
Flaky, Fluffy and Freaking Delicious: Vancouver’s Top Fry Bread and Bannock
The Best Gelato in Canada Was Made in a Hotel Room (and You Can Get it Now in Kitsilano)
Wine Collab of the Week: The Best Bottle to Welcome a Vancouver Spring
Naked Malt Blended Malt Scotch Whisky Celebrates Versatility and Spirit
A $13 Wine You Can Age in Your Cellar
5 Things to Do in Vancouver This Week (March 20-26)
5 Things to Do in Vancouver This Week (March 13-19)
Looking for a Hobby? Here’s 8 Places in Vancouver You Can Pick Up a New Skill
What It’s Like to Get Lost on a Run With a Pro Trail Runner
8 Things to Do in Abbotsford (Even If It’s Pouring Rain)
Explore the Rockies by Rail with Rocky Mountaineer
4 Fashion Designers From African Fashion Week Vancouver to Put on Your Radar
The Future of Beauty: How One Medical Aesthetics Clinic is Changing the Game
Before Hibernation Season Ends: A Round-Up of the Coziest Shopping Picks
A few years ago several thousand residents of the northeastern part of our city went to sleep in Hastings–Sunrise but woke up a) in something called the “East Village” and b) thoroughly unimpressed. Similarly, some friends at a dinner party were aghast when my wife referred to their townhouse along the north bank of the Fraser as being in the “River District.” (Such gently awkward social collisions are a regular feature of a culturally mixed marriage like ours; my wife is from Toronto.)In a city where authenticity-panic is our most deeply-rooted tradition, it’s understandable that we’d bristle against these most obvious and ham-fisted attempts at neighbourhood branding. But in a town where the gold in the ground is the ground itself, our most beloved spaces will inevitably be marketed to us, if not out from under us. And if we prevent the condo people from inventing neighbourhoods whole cloth, they’ll just use the ones we already have more subversively. In that scenario, we’ll keep having those ineffable feelings of ever-so-slight dislocation, like when you’re driving through the now semi-cool strip of North Burnaby and squint at the old neon sign that you’re 99 percent sure used to say “Helen’s” but now says “Heights.” Or like when a friend on the hard left once said to me sheepishly about the East Van cross he’d had tattooed on his forearm: “I got it before it became a brand.”It’s tough to know how to champion a neighbourhood without giving in to market boosterism. Even though reductive anti-capitalism is my preferred response to any uncomfortable situation, it’s hard to defend one’s district exclusively in opposition to commercial activity when so often it’s precisely commercial activity (in restaurants, bookstores, grocery stores, delis, even bigger delis, etc.) that embodies what we love most about them. In the face of these contradictions, it’s easy to adopt a stance of Vancouver-weary cynicism—that way, you don’t get hurt. And so it goes that nothing really matters, and Kits is just Shaughnessy with coconut water.But that’s not true. Cities are too big, as units, to be immediately vital to us on their own. The lie of Vancouver’s at-large voting system has always been that Angus Drive and Renfrew are the same place. Despite their ambiguities, and in spite of the marketing campaigns that try to make us forget about them, our neighbourhoods are worth identifying with because it’s through our immediate surroundings that we find ourselves in a metropolis. I can’t imagine my younger brother, for instance, as the adult he is today without the way he was nurtured, as a young gay man, by the West End.Likewise, I can’t imagine my own path to perennially heartbroken leftist without East Van. When our half-Vancouverite, half-Torontonian baby girl was eight months old, we left her for an evening with my aunt and uncle. In the middle of a fit, they took her for a walk in her stroller, and she calmed right down—except that whenever they turned off of Commercial Drive she started to cry again. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised,” said my uncle, “given whose kid she is.”