My Parkade

Before they painted it grey, the parkade across the street was noticeable for miles. It had a bright coat of neon green and enough lighting to make your car gleam as you circled the exit ramp.

That wasn't the only thing remarkable about this sterile concrete structure. Nobody lived or worked there. Located on the corner of Columbia and Cordova streets in the heart of one of the most densely populated neighbourhoods in Vancouver, not a soul could call the place home. I guess that's what caught my attention.

This corner was not always boring. In the 1890's, the place was two blocks down from the Evans, Coleman & Evans Wharf, the main shipping point to the Klondike. Archive records show it was occupied by Marshall Morrison ship-builders, who no doubt outfitted a few of these ships.

Located right by the docks, the place was once the heart of the hard-drinking, lumberjack community of what is now the Downtown Eastside. Second-hand loggers supplies were sold in dilapidated shacks, along with a blacksmith and carriage repair-shop. By the 1930's it was a block of stores, shops, restaurants, the Harbour View Caf'e, two barbers and some offices.

The path to parkade started in 1949 when the city demolished the block, replacing it with a vacant lot for parking. The current 6-story structure was not built until the early 1970's.

Razing a bustling block of stores to replace it with a sterile parkade was part of a broader trend in the post-war era. As the automobile was the chosen form of getting around at that point in time, massive amounts of resources now had to be devoted to the terminal capacity of the automobile. Expensive minimum parking requirements were instituted for all new developments, and land that had once been used for urban purposes was converted to parking.

There was also an external element driving the construction of parkades in Vancouver-- the massive quantities of free parking found in the suburbs. West Vancouver's Park Royal-- the ground-breaking precursor to the big-box store and modern shopping mall when built in the 1940's-- had a sea of asphalt no downtown business could compete with.

As a result, the Downtown business community united to lobby the city for downtown parkades, and with that the influential Downtown Business Association (now known as the Downtown Vancouver Association) was born. True to this tradition, it has long since advocated for car-based transportation options at the expense of transit, cycling, or pedestrian facilities. Today, the primary users of the parkade are employees of the Vancouver Police Department and Provincial Court house on Main-- many of whom I found out commute from within Vancouver.

I asked people around the neighbourhood what they thought of the parkade and it was practically non-existent. It was simply a place to park, a place as lifeless as its concrete exterior (this is not entirely true- pigeons do live in the brickwork).

However, some people did see it for what it was not. I asked a man smoking a cigarette outside what he thought. His name was Mike and he had been in the Salvation Army detox centre located next door for two months. "They should let people sleep in there," he said. "They don't let you sleep in there. Why not?

He pointed out that it was safe and dry, and that cops were going in there all the time. "You know? They help you out and we'd help them out," he said, leaning against the wall. "We could watch their cars while they're gone and that sort of thing."

The ticket checker came by a short time later. His job was to kick out people who tried to sleep there or smoke crack in the stairwell.

A few nights later some kids from the suburbs drove into the parkade and set up shop. They got out the cases of beer and cranked AC/DC while yelling obscenities for the whole neighbourhood to hear. We watched them from the balcony.

After a few hours they shut it down and disappeared into Gastown- the Blarney Stone, I imagined- only to return two hours later to get things started again. It went late, ending finally in a tire- squealing frenzy of drunk driving, the cars disappearing back out onto the streets and out of the city where they came.

The possibilities of a different, more interesting life for this piece of real-estate do not look promising. Bob Macdonald, senior parking policy engineer with the City of Vancouver, pointed out that so long as the courthouse and police station are located up the street, assuming these employees will not use transit, the parkade will continue to exist.

He also pointed out that parking is provided by practically none of the historic structures in the area, which were built long before parking was ever a modern reality. The parkade was necessary, he argued, to service the heritage area.For now, the parkade remains a grey island in the midst of a city, a home to pigeons but not people. What was once a place where people socialized, got their hair cut, lived, has for the past 60 years carried the unremarkable story of being a parking lot, oblivious to its surroundings and the different story it could have told.