Entire TD Bank Window Lies on Sidewalk

Look at the amount of glass on the sidewalk. On Sunday, May 23 at 12:30 a.m., a couple of Vancouver Police officers were standing outside the TD bank on Main St. at Pender, and more officers were walking around inside, surveying the damage.

Thanks to Terry for sending us the photo.

The real story here is that the two officers didn't interfere with the photographer. Under Chief Jim Chu, the VPD have regularly harassed and too often phyically assaulted photographers. A woman using her cell phone to photograph police taking a man down outside the No. 5 Orange earlier this year is suing the City of Vancouver, alleging that Vancouver Police officers tackled her and broke her nose.

Making Waves at Waves

Photo:  Waves coffee shop at Main & Cordova 

I wonder if the Waves coffee shop that just opened at Main & Cordova will make a go of it. The coffee shop, which has replaced Vic's restaurant, doesn't draw much of a crowd at night. It's not as welcoming an environment as the Waves on Hastings St. at Richards. And on Sunday and Tuesday nights, if you sit on a stool in the window sipping your tall latte, you're faced with the long line-up at the Sally Ann soup truck which parks across the street to feed the penniless.

Photo:  Line-up for Sally Ann soup truck

I was listening to a CKNW radio interview recently with a guy who said he owned three Waves coffee shops on the Downtown Eastside -- one at Main & Pender which closes at 10 p.m., one at Hastings & Richards which is open 24 hrs., and one that just opened at Main & Cordova which closes at midnight. He was emphasizing what a fabulous relationship his staff have with the Downtown Eastside community.

This fabulous relationship does not include hiring Downtown Eastsiders. None of his staff have that lived-in look of Downtown Eastsiders. His taste runs to recent Russian immigrant women in their late teens or early twenties. I would say the Richards St. location is exclusively staffed with young Russian women. A couple of young Russia men have also managed to get hired there on the all-night shift. I don't hang out in the Pender St. (Chinatown) location near Carnegie Center; it seems less Russian.  I've seen a Chinese woman working there. A woman who regularly works evenings at the Cordova St. location seems Russian to me, although a man at Carnegie has since told me he believes she's German).

Regardless of where this young, heavy-set woman with a blond ponytail came from, she comes across like a school marm who would love to swat a Downtown Eastsider across the ear with a ruler.

There was a group of regulars in there on Friday night recently -- they used to show up at the Cordova St. Waves a little after 10 p.m. and when that location closed, they would sometimes head up to the Richards St. Waves -- and this staffer caught one of them eating a stick of stuffed celery as she chatted with friends staring at their laptop screens. The staffer walked over to the customer and scolded her, "You can't eat your own food in here." The customer said, "Ok". But the staffer returned for a second go-round, snapping at the customer about how the next time she had her own food, "I will ask you to go outside."

"What did she say?", a regular male customer, a t-shirt artist with a studio up the street, asked. "She wants us to eat those terrible sandwiches they sell," a man who buys lattes there on a regular basis called out.

You'd think the staffer would be grateful to have a group of regulars in an almost empty restaurant on a Friday night, I thought.

Then the staffer did the unthinkable. She switched off the internet without telling customers. It was not yet midnight and one man had just bought a coffee and was pissed off that he couldn't surf the net while he sipped it. He politely asked her -- she was by then mopping the floor around his table with Lysol -- if she had turned it off. She said she had, "You're always here late and we're closing. We have to go home." He pointed out that usually they lock the door to new customers at midnight but let people already inside finish their coffee. "We'll take our business elsewhere," he announced to his friends. "We'll tell Bill to get a blogger to write her up", he said laughing.

He then held up his paper cup of coffee saying, "This cup is leaking." The staffer nonchalantly replied, "Some of our cups are leaking tonight," as she continued to mop around him. "Some?", he said. Familiarity breeds contempt. I know that's a cliche but it seems to be exactly what was happening here. The staffer slipped a second paper cup over his leaky one.

As he was leaving, he announced that there was too much water on the floor from the mopping. "That will ruin the floor," he said. Outside the door, he stood on the corner yelling, "Leaky cups! No internet! What next?! If you have leaky cups, you don't serve them, you tell your supplier!" Another regular guy interjected, "Maybe she had no other cups. She was nice to me,"he said, "She said goodnight. Stay on good terms with them. It's good to have wifi in the neighborhood."

They turned to walk up Cordova, taking their business elsewhere. To Waves on Richards, owned by the same man.

That was two weeks ago and when I've since walked past Waves on Cordova at night, I've looked in the window to see if the regulars were there. They weren't.  So I asked the guy who got the leaky cup and he confirmed, "We don't go there anymore."

Cherry Blossoms in Chinatown

Cherry blossoms on Keefer St. in Chinatown.

(Date stamp on camera is wrong.)

Dollar Store No More

The Dollar Giant that opened at Pender St. near Main in Chinatown last year boasted, "HONEST! NOTHING OVER A... $1"   

No more.  

They've added ".25" to all the dollar signs in the windows.  Everything in the store is now $1.25, other than food items which will continue to be $1.

I asked a security guard when the prices had gone up.  "About a month ago," he said.  

A clerk told me that the prices have not gone up at all Dollar Giants.  "Not at the one on Kingsway & Clark or the one on Commercial Dr."  The clerk speculated that the price increase at the Chinatown location was due to the number of shoplifters. 

To see another photo, click: Downtown Eastside Enquirer

 

The prices are still good though.  I dropped in a few days ago and got file folders, a package of five, for $1.25.  

I hope they stay in business.

Man Stabbed Near Carnegie Center This Evening

A man was stabbed in the back on Main St., just a little south of Carnegie Center where Chinatown begins, at around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday.  The victim was pressing his hand against his wound.  

Smokers sitting on the Carnegie outdoor patio went over to the railing to gawk at the police and amublance arriving.  Police had yellow tape around the crime scene but have since taken it down.

Drug dealers and users hang around on that area of the sidewalk.  

Poor T-4

On Monday at around 3 p.m., I walked by H & R Block Tax Services on Main St. near Carnegie and there was a crowd of people outside.  A woman waiting in the crowd was loudly explaining that H & R Block wasn't taking any more people that day, that they had given out tickets but they had stopped at 165.

That's when I knew that the T-4's had come out.  

"Nobody gets you money faster, instant cash back", blares a sign in the window of H & R Block.  If you take in your T-4 slip, H & R Block will do  your taxes and give you the refund right away, but they skim a little off the top.  

I was surprised that so many people were in need of quick cash.   Welfare day was just last Wednesday. 

Scottish Bagpipes a Hit at Chinese New Year Parade

Umbrellas lined Pender St. today as spectators watched the Chinese New Year parade inVancouver's Chinatown.

A few of the dragons in the parade wore plastic to keep the rain off their heads.

I thought I heard bagpipes. "Scottish bagpipes for Chinese New Year?"  But I knew that in multi-culti, multi-grant Canada, anything was possible.  

There were other cultures represented in the parade too, from Vietnamese to Haida.

I was looking at the CKNW mascot and then I said, "Hey, that's Christie Clark."  I listen to her talk show sometimes.  

 

The guy in the cap in the above photo was a 'rain on the parade' type of photographer.  The parade was an event made for photographers and there were many bending the rules by going into the street to get a closer shot.  Eventually a parade crowd-control Chinese woman came around with a loud speaker and started moving photographers back toward the yellow line by the sidewalk.  So a bunch of photographers were backing up all at once and the guy with the cap decides to squat on the street and change his camera's memory card.  Then he got angry at another photographer, saying that her umbrella could have poked his eye out. She was carrying a closed umbrella by her side and it didn't have a pointed tip.  That's the first time I've seen a photographer get nasty to another while covering a news event; I've always been amazed at how cordial photographers at these events are toward one another.       

I recognized these musicians, The Carnival Band.  They played at the bandstand next to Science World last November at the party finishing off 'Bike to Work Week'. 

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.]

Snow-Packed Awning Crashes to Sidewalk in front of Chinatown Bakery

When an awning falls in Chinatown, does anybody hear? People in the second floor dining room at Carnegie Center heard a crash. One Carnegie member recalled that he was watching a movie in the dining area at the time; he's pretty sure it was Christmas Eve.

It was not until he and others went outside later that they realized that the awning over the bakery on Main St. (next to the Royal Bank at Main & Hastings) had fallen to the sidewalk. It appeared to have collapsed under the weight of the snow.

The above photo shows the holes left after the bolts gave way and the awning fell.

As of this evening, the awning was still lying on the sidewalk. It's filled with water, after last night's rain.

Anti-Olympics Activists Hang "Riot 2010" Banner in Chinatown Today

This afternoon at about 4:20 p.m., I was walking down Main St. near Pender in Chinatown when I came across this huge "Riot 2010" banner. When I walked back 15 minutes later it was gone.


But a sandwich board on the sidewalk outside remained.

Chinatown Opens Donation Depot for Earthquake Victims

On Main Street near Keefer in Vancouver's Chinatown, a storefront has been opened to take donations for victims of China's recent earthquake. They have photos and information about the quake.

I saw it open a few times when I walked buy. It was open on Wednesday.

TD Bank in Chinatown Robbed

Last Wednesday evening around 5:30, the TD Canada Trust at the corner of Main & Pender in Chinatown was robbed.

A Downtown Eastside resident heard sirens and went over. There was a sign on the door saying that the bank was closed due to an "Emergency". A guy in a suit standing inside the door was telling customers they could not enter. The Downtown Eastside resident asked, "Was there a robbery?" "Yes", the man in the suit responded, "But we got the guy."

There were two police ghost cars there at the time the Downtown Eastside resident arrived. Police officers were inside.

Live Trolley Bus Wire Snaps in Chinatown Trapping Man in Car

A live trolley bus wire snapped and trapped a man in his car on Tuesday at about 3:30 p.m. in Chinatown. This was the second day in a row that an electrical trolley wire had fallen in the same spot, Main & Pender in Chinatown, during rush hour.

The man trapped on Tuesday in his small brown Sedan risked electrocution if he had stepped out of his car. "It had just started raining again to make it worse; the street was wet," a witness said. It had been raining in that morning and during the night too. The witness was convinced that if the man had gotten out of his car, "He would have been a goner, ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ."
The wire snapped "like a clothesline breaking", the witness said. If the live wire had hit the man's windshield when it came down, he added, it could have broken his windshield and killed him.

The witness believes it may have been the strain of the bus turning from Main St. on to Pender at that moment that caused the wire to snap.

"There was an Asian guy in the car; he didn't look like he was worried," the witness said. "The Transit supervisor was talking to him."

Police were telling people not to step off the curb. "No cars could get by; you couldn't turn left or right on Pender."

The witness had seen the same scene the day before during afternoon rush hour. "They had the cones out, they had transit supervisors, pretty well in the same spot. Police were putting the barricades up."