"Every place has a story to tell. . . . Sometimes the stories are buried beneath the years' changes, so that it requires a historian, an archeologist, or teller of tales to reveal what lies beneath."
Robert R. Archibald, July, 2011
WHEN historian Robert Archibald entreated his readers to look at the history of some of their "oldest streets and alleys," he would have done so from his perspective as president of the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis.
He would not have had the streetscapes of North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood in mind, as I had last week.
Nor could Archibald be expected to know that, just over a year later, Vancouver's Gastown would not only have become a "hotbed of men's fashion," it would have been judged the fourth most stylish district in the world by the self-described pop culture magazine, complex.com.
Nevertheless, as I compared my impressions of Gastown with the thoughts I gathered over a summer of walking through the unique community below Third Street, I realized the two neighbourhoods have a lot in common.
Despite some of the less attractive features that bind them, Archibald would recognize in a heartbeat the other characteristics they share: the architecture and history of their times. He would understand that although some buildings still "bear names that evoke their past," the streets in both communities also share the troubles of the present: the homeless wanderers, the ever-present litter.
Lower Lonsdale lags behind Gastown in its efforts to preserve and restore the architecture and ambience of the past, but it has similar incentives to inject more energy into the process.
Anyone familiar with the area between Third Street and parties at The Pier will see that despite the best efforts of many local businesses and the flashes of summer colours tended by city workers, cracked sidewalks are usually buried, not "beneath the years' changes" but under a mix of cigarette butts, blowing litter, discarded pop cans and coffee cups.
Worst of all are the pigeon droppings that accumulate around the buildings south of Second Street.
Where has all our pride gone?
Yet beyond all that, when patrons of the small cafes sit idly watching passersby, they cannot help but notice there is a vibrancy to the area that prods one to imagine how life might have been in the busy Moodyville community of long ago - and how the story-making might again be brought to life.
Today, business-men jostle for space alongside backpack-laden students as they hurry downhill to the SeaBus. Jaunty umbrellas bob up and down over rainbow-haired females who challenge the uneven paving stones on four-inch heels. The homeless, or nearly so, pass the bakery window - thinking what, we can only guess. Saddest of all is a man who, apparently untreated and uncared for, often walks by totally engrossed in a conversation with himself.
As with any other neighbourhood, it has taken all kinds of people to continue the history of that Lonsdale community.
Defying the admonitions of Plato - that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it - I have never been one to visit museums in the places I have frequented.
Nevertheless, there must have been a process of assimilation at work. How else to explain the fact that, while reading over a bistro latte, errant thoughts are wont to transport my surroundings to the streets of old?
Other than the colours and the garments of the times, it makes no difference to my musings whether the streets are of Moodyville or of the European cities of a bygone era.
I just imagine I'm at one with the real writers and artistes of the past - people who composed operatic arias in Italian attics, or discussed their latest paintings and literary works with their contemporaries at the sidewalk café tables of Paris.
And when I come down to Earth, I understand it's not the lifeless, untouchable history I was made to study in the textbooks of my youth that reaches out to me.
What matters most about the Lower Lonsdale architecture I hope to see preserved, is that the bricks and mortar of those buildings still hold the essences of all who touched or walked within their walls.
After more than 24 years at the helm of the history museum in St. Louis, Archibald could be forgiven if he ranked among the driest of dry historians. But parts of his book, A Place to Remember: Using History to Build Community, belie such a stereotype:
"Places are produced in that wonderful interaction of people, place, narrative and time. When the people desert these places, narratives are forgotten, ties break, and the place is unmade. What is unremembered in abandonment cannot be re-remembered in transient automobile suburbs with too few places for shared experience and story-making."
Let us not abandon that area of Lower Lonsdale to our carelessness.
Let us instead use history to rebuild that community because, expensive and "award-winning" though they may be, modern-day concrete and glass towers can never replace the souls that still live in our memories of the past.
