East Broadway & St. Catherines, Vancouver, 1991

With time on our hands in these days of self-isolation, what excuses are there for procrastination — attending to those projects we’ve been promising we’ll do “at some point?”

In my case, there are neglected archives of negatives I never seem to find time to scan. After I prepared Monday’s topical army surplus store shot, the binder covering the period just before I left Vancouver lay open on my desk. In the interim, I’ve flipped through negs and contact sheets, sitting down yesterday to scan and process a dozen more images I hope are worth adding to my Vancouver documentary collection.

Half the fun is “driving” around on Google Street View, trying to pin down locations, especially, as in this case, when buildings have disappeared from contemporary views. In 1991, my now wife and I owned a condo at E. Broadway and Windsor, one block east of St. Catherines, a new building that probably supplanted scenes like the one above. So this was our neighbourhood and corner store. Commercial Drive with its colourful Italian family restaurants, bars, book and coffee shops, cinema and produce stores was and is a short walk away.

I miss those Vancouver attractions (as deserted as anywhere at this writing) and that horizon of the North Shore Mountains, a lodestone for which I’ve never found a replacement. However, it was during this time in East Vancouver that the first sustained gang wars erupted, between Vietnamese and Russian gangsters as I recall. The cracking of gunfire in the night was part of the motivation for us leaving the city where we met.

If these circumstances are to extend into the summer and beyond, I may run out of vintage work to present. Do the last of my Vancouver photos deserve a gallery of their own — 90s Vancouver? Let me know in the comments below.