While danger lurks everywhere or nowhere, depending on your outlook there are parts of Vancouver that call for some awareness, if not outright caution. First and foremost is the Downtown Eastside, the city’s center until the early 19005. By the middle ofthe century, it had become a refuge for out-of-work loggers and fishermen, poor immigrants, and the otherwise financially bereft. For decades, many (though by no means all) of its residents have drowned their sorrows in the hotel beer parlors that still proliferate along East Hastings Street. However, for the past twenty years or so, many Downtown Eastsiders young and middle-aged have turned to smoking and injecting cocaine and heroin. At last estimate, the area housed a good proportion of B.C’s 15,000 addicts, many of whom are HIv-positive. Their turfs and trajectories, while not easily defined, are places in which to take care.
The social hub of the drug trade is the corner of Hastings and Main streets, specifically the sidewalks outside the city-run Carnegie commu¬nity center (once the city’s library and still housing a branch library) and west on Hastings. When the police show up, the regular sellers and users scatter. At any other time, you can stand on the porch of the Carnegie center, or along the south side of Hastings Street, and watch all kinds of substances changing hands in a pretty open man-ner, and desperados toking up, in any of a number of bizarre ways, on the spot.
Two blocks north, on the same side of Main Street, is the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Centre’s Needle Exchange (221 Main Street), which is responsible for freely dispensing, at last count, more than three million syringes annually. Continue past a police station on Main Street, at Cordova Street, and east on Cordova for a few blocks, and you’ll come to Oppenheimer Park, an out-of-the-way oasis where many addicts hang out.
West from Main Street on Hastings Street, the scene is almost as bleak. And while city and provincial governments provide hundreds of clean and secure rooms and services for the ill and addicted, this stretch of Hastings — which includes the Portland Hotel, housing people with multiple afflictions — remains particularly rough.
While not the worst block in terms of drug-related activity, the 100 block of West Hastings Street, between Abbot and Cambie streets, with its unrelenting bank of abandoned buildings, is a clear sign of the economic devastation inflicted on the entire community.
There are other troublesome pockets: Blood Alley, a tarted-up cobble¬stone precinct north of Cordova and between Abbott and Carrall streets; the lanes of Chinatown, even into Strathcona; and the nighttime waterfront areas, including Portside Park at the north end of Main Street and eastward along Powell Street.
The drug culture has a presence elsewhere in the city, including Commercial Drive and the surrounding Grandview-Woodlands community. Much to the annoyance of left-wing organizations and marijuana activists, a community policing society moved into a former park-keeper’s cottage in Grandview Park in the heart of The Drive supposedly discouraging trafficking, and reducing the number of needles found in the park and surrounding residential gardens. At last report, business remains brisk at the corner of Com¬mercial Drive and 6th Avenue; hold onto your possessions around the SkyTrain station, a few blocks to the south at Broadway.
Tired-looking Kingsway, a major thoroughfare that cuts through east Vancouver on the diagonal, attracts illegal gaming and other unsavory goings-on that very occasionally flare up into a stabbing or shootout. Some of the shabby eateries closet illegal VLTs (video lottery terminals) in their back rooms, and you play these at your risk. Though well sup¬plied with Asian restaurants and clubs, Kingsway can be particularly gloomy at night.
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