Tom's Gone

Photo: Thornton Park in front of Pacific Central Station at Terminal & Main St. in Vancouver, Tues. Oct. 21/08

I had found myself looking out the window of McDonald's near Terminal & Main to see if Old Tom’s red car was in it’s usual corner spot in the parking lot. He hadn't dropped in for coffee for awhile.

I didn’t know he had died.

Tuesday morning, I dropped into McDonald's on the way to work and one of the regulars, a guy from New Brunswick, said in a softer than usual voice, “You know Tom died?” I got tears in my eyes as I thought of how there would be no more chats with him. I wanted more.

This morning, the instant I woke up I knew something wasn't quite right. I felt sad. "Oh yeah, Old Tom died."

Tom Moore was about 73 years old. We called him Old Tom to distinguish him from a younger Tom who had also been dropping into McDonald's near Main & Terminal for coffee for years. Before McDonald's, Burger King next door had been the drop-in spot for Tom and his pals to have coffee, until the policy was changed and there were no more free refills.

Tom lived for years in the little house at Strathcona Park where he got free rent in exchange for doing caretaker work, like keeping the washrooms clean. In recent years, he's lived in the caretaker’s house at a park in Mount Pleasant.

From what I've heard, Tom died of a heart attack on Saturday. The guys at the coffee shop know it was the cigarettes that killed him. They knew him when he quit smoking 20 years ago after emphysema set in. But the damage was done.

I had seen Tom around for years but it was only in the last couple of years that I had begun sitting with him and his pals for coffee. Tom fit in on the Downtown Eastside and had a few street people as pals; they would make a few bucks doing odd jobs for him or selling him things they had binned, sometimes even stolen. But Tom stood out on the Downtown Eastside too, because he was smarter than average. He hadn't been to university but he was fun to chat with about politics because he had read a lot and seen a lot in his 73 years. He could usually be counted on to have a perspective -- he wasn't at all hamstrung by political correctness -- that you wouldn’t find in any newspaper.

Tom could be crusty. I told him to back off a couple of times, resulting in loud arguments. But I miss him now that he doesn't park his little red car or big red truck in the corner spot in the parking lot and sit at one of the tables out front. Today, as I sat out front in the sun with a friend who'd been having coffee with Tom for 16 years, I said, “I wish he could come back.”

Man Stabbed in Eye at Savoy Pub

Photo above: A Vancouver Police officer guards the door of the Savoy Pub this afternoon.

A man was reportedly stabbed in the eye this afternoon at the Savoy Pub on Hasting St., just east of Main & Hastings.

According to a witness, police took everybody out of the pub, stopping traffic to get them across the street to the police station for questioning.


The Savoy Pub is close to Main & Hastings, seen in the background.

Photo above: Vancouver Police officer guarding door of Savoy Pub this afternoon chats with a passerby. He was turning people away as they arrived to enter the pub.

Cat on the Hat

When this man dropped into Pathways Employment Centre at Main & Hastings last week to use one of the public-access computers, he had his cat with him. His cat Caylie, who was a day shy of 11 weeks old when this photo was taken, likes to crawl up onto his cap, whether he's sitting or standing.

Thanks to the Downtown Eastside resident who emailed this photo to us.

"Don't Believe the Truth": Oasis for Poor during Olympics to be Photo-Op for Media

The nerve. Ethel Whitty, Director of Vancouver’s Carnegie Community Center who has established a reputation for banning poor and homeless people from Carnegie quicker than you can say “Nixon’s enemies list”, has now announced that she is a prime organizer of a “refuge” for the poor and homeless at nearby Oppenheimer Park. It is called the Oasis Winter Festival and will occur during the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Whitty announced the Oasis Winter Festival in her Director’s Report at the Carnegie Board meeting membership of Carnegie Center at the Sept. 4 meeting of the Board of Directors. The Oasis will be held on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for 7-10 days in February 2010, during the Winter Olympics. A trial-run Oasis will be held in 2009.

“We’ll set up two large tents,” Whitty wrote in her Director’s Report. “One tent will be a source of nutritious food and beverage for participants and one for art activities and entertainment. ….” Whitty, who knows the poverty game as well as any Olympic athlete knows their game, is aware that a sure way to draw a crowd to any event on the Downtown Eastside is to offer free food. The other tent at the Oasis will be “for art activities and entertainment.”

Totem pole in Oppenheimer Park where the Oasis Festival on the Downtown Eastside will be held. Photo taken Oct. 2008.

“The intention”, Whitty writes in her report, “is to give homeless and poorly housed residents of the Downtown Eastside a chance to receive support from the community at a time, during the Olympics, when they will otherwise be the subject of media scrutiny and tourist interest.”

That’s not the real intention though, according to poverty industry watcher Dag Walker. The intention is to create “a sea of poor people” in plain sight of the media. “It’s not nearly as effective if the media just sees a few homeless people here and there,” Walker explains, “It’s more effective to attract a huge number of the poor and homeless to a small space.” Whitty and her povertarian partners will essentially be telling the media, ‘Don’t look at the elephant on the table’, but they know that the media scouring the notorious Downtown Eastside during the Olympics in search of stories will take photographs of this large congregation of poor people, photographs that will be transmitted around the world. The povertarians are arranging a media event, a photo op, with the intention of embarrassing the government globally.

The message transmitted through the global media will be the same as that regularly transmitted by the povertarians through the local media: “Poverty is an out of control problem on the Downtown Eastside and the government must direct more money toward this problem.” More money directed toward the Downtown Eastside means more money for povertarians who make their living in the lucrative poverty industry here.

Box for discarded needles of drug users attached to the fence of the baseball diamond at Oppenheimer Park. Photo taken Oct. 12, 2008.

Anyone unaware of Whitty’s record of human rights abuses targeting the poor and/or homeless — she was even caught feeding fraudulent “evidence” to a CBC Radio interviewer about the reason for the barring of homeless man, William Simpson, from Carnegie after poor people elected him to the Carnegie Board — could get the impression from her Director’s Report that she cares about the poor: “This event will be ongoing everyday and will provide a refuge and a comfort zone where participants can be entertained or take part in organized art activities arranged by those who know them best; their fellow community members.” Arranged by their fellow community members? Most of the people working at Oasis will be well paid unionized povertarians who, at the end of their shifts on the Downtown Eastside, can’t get out of the neighborhood fast enough.

Just look at the groups Whitty lists as being recruited to operate the Oasis: “We hope the community partners will include Carnegie Centre staff from Oppenheimer [Park] and the Outreach teams, Aboriginal Front Door, VANDU [Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users], VCH, Pivot, DEWC, Community Arts Network, Gallery Gachet, etc.” The overwhelming majority of workers in these groups do not live on the Downtown Eastside and their loyalty to one another is stronger than their loyalty to poor people.

Take Pivot Legal Society, a group of radical young lawyers who claim to be committed to improving civil liberties in the poor Downtown Eastside neighborhood and creating “trickle up” benefits for everyone else in society. When homeless William Simpson asked Pivot for help after Whitty hand-delivered him a letter banning him from the Carnegie premises and Board meetings just two weeks after poor people had elected him to the Carnegie Board – the barring was carried out under the supervision of City Manager and Olympic Organizing Committee member Judy Rogers – Pivot turned him away with the response, “But they’re our friends.”

All of these “friends” running grant guzzling organizations on the Downtown Eastside are experienced in dealing with media; they can be counted on to have designated spokespersons at Oasis who can be trusted not to veer off the message about the government obligation to give more to their assorted projects. Those projects range from a supervised drug injection site a few blocks from Oppenheimer Park to the annual Heart of the City theater production by Carnegie in which Whitty has been exposed for passing off actors from more affluent neighborhoods to the media as Downtown Eastside poor people speaking on behalf of their fellow poor people — not unlike the way Whitty is passing off Oasis as a refuge for poor people “arranged by those who know them best; their fellow community members.” Let the games begin.

On the morning of Oct.12, 2008 when this photo was taken, there was one person sleeping in Oppenheimer Park.

Pouring Rain

It was pissin' down rain late yesterday afternoon as this pedestrian walked across the Georgia Viaduct toward Main St.

Just Desserts at the Downtown Community Court

Usually when a Downtown Eastsider walks into a courthouse, they expect to be served something other than jumbo chocolate chip cookies. But that's what they got this afternoon at the opening lunch of the new Community Court on Gore St. near Cordova, beside the Sunrise Market.


The Community Court, which began operating earlier this month and is modeled on one in New York City, will offer a quick, "integrated" response to people nabbed for petty crime in downtown Vancouver. There will be a welfare worker, a housing worker, a forensic psychiatrist, to name a few, in the court house to connect people pleading guilty with services that might help them. The idea is that helping people with some of their underlying problems such as being broke, addicted, homeless, might diminish their temptation to break into your car and mine. Sentences will often involve community service such as cleaning alleys or working in kitchens.


Today, sheriffs standing at the front door of the Community Court were calling out to people walking by on Gore St., "Come on in! Have a burger!" Inside the building, a corridor led past the closed door of a court room and on to an outdoor court yard. Some Downtown Eastsiders recognized it as the courtyard of the old pre-trail jail. Today, it was the site of a lunch catered by the Bread Garden: hamburgers with lettuce, onions, tomatoes, pickles, etc., hot dogs, potato salad, caesar salad with large croutons, bags of potato chips, cans of pop and bottles of water. For dessert, there were assorted fresh jumbo-size chocolate chip cookies with huge chunks of chocolate in them. There were other varieties of jumbo cookies too, like chocolate with almond slivers sprinkled on top.

The guy in the off-white suit and green shirt just left of center in the above photo is a judge in the Community Court. A guy walked up to him and said, "You look sober, you must be the judge." The judge laughed and said, "It's early in the day."

Photo above: Guests mingle in the outdoor court yard where the lunch was held inside the Community Court building.

Photo above: A sheriff in dress uniform stands at the back of the food line up in the outdoor courtyard.


Here a sheriff chats with people lined up for food. Early on, the crowd was made up largely of people who worked in the neighbourhood, with just a smattering of the low income population. But word soon got out that there was a free lunch at the community court -- somebody yelled it out at Main & Hastings -- and a crowd of poor people showed up. The food quickly ran out as they had catered for just 300.