Trees at Carnegie Dying under "Green" Vision Council

Under "Green" Vision Council, the life is being choked out of trees on the outdoor patio at Carnegie Centre at Main & Hastings.

The patio trees are surrounded by steel grates which they have outgrown.  The grates are now sticking into the tree trunks, choking the trees.  One guy, a nature lover, smoking on the patio a couple of weeks ago, said he complained to Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty about the fact that the trees were being choked and those grates had to be adjusted.  Nothing was done.

Mayor Robertson and the Vision/COPE Council have kept Whitty, in a job that pays over $100,000 even though she has consistently failed to address issues raised by Downtown Eastsiders.  She gets millions of dollars a year to run Carnegie and she can't manage to loosen the grates around the outdoor trees.

Meanwhile, the City is fining health food millionaire businessman, Aaron Stevens, for cutting trees in his backyard.  Many of those trees amounted to dead brush in the backyard of a property that the previous owner had left unattended for years.

Women Arrested for Scratching and Hitting Pedestrians

A twenty-something woman was drunk late Thursday afternoon and was scratching and hitting pedestrians at Main & Hastings.  She was arrested on Hastings next to the Royal Bank.

At least seven uniformed police officers, two on bicycles, arrived at the scene, along with two paramedics.  There was a police paddy wagon and one ambulance.

The woman arrested was native, slim, with shoulder length brown hair.

Rush Hour Traffic Stopped to Protest Closure of Health Contact Centre

At rush hour on Monday, traffic was stopped at Main & Hastings by people protesting the closure of the nearby Health Contact Centre. There was another planned for Tuesday afternoon outside the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre. Protesters were chanting, "Save the Contact Centre, the Contact Centre Saves Lives."

Those povertarian jobs are union which is why the BCGEU yellow flags were there.

I was only at the Health Contact Centre a couple of times, when it first opened. I remember they had a gigantic board on the wall listing the programs they offered. One was knitting classes. I remember they also had free peppermint tea, that you could help yourself to.

I went there because a friend and his pals used to sit in there in the evening and use their laptops and he asked me to help him fix his laptop. So we went in there and sat in an empty room, one that musicians usually used. We were in there no more than 5 minutes and a woman who worked there came by and yelled at us to get out of that room. She was a real bull, just another abusive povertarian with zero communication skills.

There may have been some good going on in the Health Contact Centre; I didn't see it. I knew a guy who seemed to enjoy playing music in there at night after he left Carnegie.

There was definitely a nanny state function to the place. I saw that when I talked to an acquaintance who lived in a room on the Downtown Eastside with his wife. He used to be a fisherman and lived up Vancouver Island in a town that he said "went ghost". He and his wife started doing crack and had their last kid taken away, a kid they had named "Chance", as they considered him their last chance. They were hustlers and quite high functioning when it came to earning extra cash to top up their welfare. Anyway, he told me that his wife had told him to drop by the Health Contact Centre and get some sanitary napkins 'cause they were giving them out free, and why buy them if you can score them for free. So he went over there and came back with eight. Eight from the nanny state.

Now people have to walk all the way over to Oppenheimer Park to load up on free sanitary napkins. I guess that's what Coastal Health meant when they said services were being duplicated.

I got the impression the Contact Centre had shrunk when I looked in the door more recently, but I didn't pay much attention. I did notice Mark Townsend, who along with his wife is co-director of the Portland Hotel Society [PHS] which runs the Downtown Eastside poverty industry like a company town, quoted in the newspaper as saying that the Contact Centre was the size of a "postage stamp". He said it was too small to be a longterm drop-in centre, so he supported the closure. What he didn't mention was that the funding for the Contact Centre is being transferred to the LifeSkills Centre. Guess who runs the LifeSkills centre? Mark Townsend and the PHS.

What Comes Down Must Go Up

Saturday evening, I walked by the Chinatown bakery where the awning had fallen but the awning wasn’t on the sidewalk anymore. It was back up and two service men were on ladders under it.

One of the service men, who spoke good English with a Chinese accent, asked, "Why are you taking my picture?" "For the internet news", I said.

He then volunteered a comment about the awning business being brisk after the snowfall. "I've done sooooo many today." He listed some of the places he'd been working that day: "Commercial [Dr.], City Center, Victoria [Dr.]

Royal Bank Hired Gunman Orders, "GET MOVING!!"

It was almost 10 p.m. on Sunday night when I rushed to the cash machine at the TD Bank in Chinatown. The TD now locks the cash machine at 10 p.m. to prevent the homeless from sleeping in there. I was too late, the door was locked. Another customer arrived also to discover that he was too late.

A homeless guy -- I didn't ask him if he was homeless but he looked frail and had lots of missing teeth so I assumed he was homeless -- was standing there and said, "Don't worry, I'll open it for you." He pulled a card out of his wallet, stuck it in the door and flicked the lock open.

I knew he would hit us up for spare change, and he did. But he wasn't aggressive. As I walked north on Main St., he walked alongside me, chatting.

Suddenly, three armed men came toward us. One said "Excuse me, GET MOVING!!" I realized then that these guys had pulled up in an armoured car (on the right of photo above) and were entering the Royal Bank, presumably to pick up money. Now they owned the sidewalk.

We had been sauntering along and it would have been obvious to the guard that we would be past the Royal Bank in less than a minute.

I told the homelss guy that I felt like telling that guard that this sidewalk was public space. The homeless guy told me not to say anything, "They've got guns." I retorted, "I'm going to go back and take their picture when they come out." "NOOO!", he responded, "They've got guns!" I took a picture of their vehicle, but I stayed well back. They came out of the building about five minutes after verbally abusing us.

Churchill Armoured Car service passes Carnegie Center after picking up bags at RBC across the street.

I thought of the Pivot Legal Society report, "Security before Justice", that has just come out on the problem of homeless people being removed from public spaces by private security. Pivot's Laura Track told the media "They're limiting people's access to public space and relocating the homeless..." I also recall Track telling the media that this discrimination is often based on a person having the 'appearance' of being poor.

Although I would like to see Pivot criticize civil liberties abuses by publicly-funded security guards as much as they do private security, I can see what they mean about, "Security before Justice" in public spaces.

My mood was wrecked for an hour after being told to "GET MOVING!!".

Downtown Eastsider, Audrey Laferriere, to Run for City Council

Audrey Laferriere is running for City Council as an Independent in the November 2008 election.

You might remember Laferriere as the woman who earlier this month managed to get 100 signatures of Carnegie members who wanted a recount of the election of the Carnegie Board of Directors. She got help from a few others but she was the organizer behind the effort which produced the signatures in just a few days. Laferriere and other supporters of Rachel Davis were suspicious of the election results. Now there will be a meeting at Carnegie on July 31st in which people can vote on whether to hold a recount. (A minimum of thirty people must show up to make the vote valid.)

Laferriere has a blog, Voice of Gone Ballistic, in which a comment she made about the people who flock to the Downtown Eastside to provide services to the poor caught my eye.

"Just look at all the service providers who also have double gated their entrances. The service providers should be fighting for shelters not paying for bars."

This reminded me of something I saw earlier this year, in the winter, at Pathways Employment Center for the poorest of the poor at Main & Hastings. I had dropped into Pathways one morning looking for Bill Simpson, the homeless man banned from Carnegie Center across the street for carrying a link on his website to the DTES Enquirer. The federal government Security guard at Pathways was pushing the side doors open, attempting to push a man sleeping under a white blanket out of the Main Street entrance. The Indo-Canadian guard was yelling at the man in pigeon English to wake up and get out. The receptionist was watching. The computer tech counting the days to retirement was watching. This drama had been going on for a few minutes when I left. I was amazed that the guard was bothering as I had never seen anyone use that side entrance to Pathways; it always appeared locked to me.

The next day, when I walked by Pathways, I noticed workmen there installing iron bars around the steps (photo by dag above). The homeless would no longer be sleeping there. But these service providers claim to be soooooo sensitive to the poor and homeless. And the Director of Pathways, Carol Madson, is according to a client who has had conversations with her, "an NDP type".

Woman Jumps from 7th Floor of Regent Hotel

The word on the Downtown Eastside is that a woman jumped from the 7th floor inside the Regent Hotel this afternoon. That's the hotel in the background of the above photo with red vertical lettering.

The woman whose boyfriend had reportedly hanged himself recently, died from her injuries.

One Downtown Eastsider said of people on the sidewalk outside the hotel, "Everybody was looking up."

We haven't confirmed that a woman jumped but two police cars and a ghost car were outside the Regent. Not just constables but a couple of higher ranking police officers were there as well. And an ambulance, we were told, had been at the scene earlier and ambulance attendants had gone inside the hotel.

A constable was questioning a civilian. You can see that if you look closely in the background of this photo, just below the Union Market sign.

At the Sally Ann soup line on Sunday night, a man was talking about the jumper at the Regent. He said that one under reported story is the number of people jumping from the Washington Hotel. One woman he said jumped but didn't die and is now a parapalegic.

Traffic Lights Down and No Cops Around

All traffic lights were stuck on red at the busy Main and Hastings intersection during rush hour this afternoon. I first got a report at about 3:30 p.m, another report at 4:00 p.m., and another at 4:45 p.m. that the lights were still down. They started functioning again shortly before 5 p.m.

There were no Vancouver Police on the scene the entire time. At around 4 p.m., one police officer drove by in a squad car, turning toward the police station just around the corner on Main. He didn't seem concerned about the mayhem. "Shift change," said a bystander.

Multiple lanes of cars were headed in the direction of pedestrians walking in the crosswalks. One woman with her baby in a stroller was talking to a male friend on her left, not realizing that three cars were coming at her from her right. The drivers did see her and slowed as she suddenly saw them and darted to the safety of the sidwalk.

The drivers were actually quite courteous. The fact that they were crossing against red lights may have made them more willing to yield to pedestrians.

A Downtown Eastside resident sent us the above photo.

Where were the police?

Bus Kills Pedestrian at Main & Hastings

A "Top Class Limousine" tour bus was at the bottom of it's class tonight when it had a pedestrian under it's wheel. The 68 year old pedestrian was struck by the bus shortly before 9 p.m. as it turned north off Hastings onto Main St., by the Pathways Job Search Center. A witness who passed by shortly after the accident, said, "They had to take him out from under the wheel." (The pedestrian can be seen lying under a white sheet at the left of the photo above.)

The bus appeared empty of passengers.

At least one security guard came to help from the Carnegie Community Center across the street. The pedestrian still had a pulse but as a police officer entering the Carnegie Center said, "It doesn't look good." He died shortly afterwards at the scene. He did not die enroute to hospital as CTV television reported. He was put into a wine colored body bag at the scene and loaded into the coroner's van.

A bearded VPD Constable wearing a turban (on right of photo above) stood behind the yellow tape across the street from the accident to make sure nobody violated that boundry. But his skills as a community-friendly cop were less than stellar; he was defensive and snooty when a local resident politely asked him if he could walk on the Main Street sidewalk to get home. That same Constable was standing by the yellow tape at the Cambie Hotel on February 15th, the night Steve Seymour was shot to death.