Risky Rainbow Play

I thought I would be the type of parent who would take my kid on public transport frequently. That by her almost 3 years of age, she would have ridden the bus at least once or twice. Would know what the yellow rope was for, would know to say thank you upon exiting. Would be familiar with the screeching brakes of the SkyTrain or the incessant beeps of Compass cards tapping in and out.

COVID kept my daughter off the bus these past couple years and it wasn’t until today that she got her wish of riding one. She’s been singing “The Wheels on the Bus” since God knows how long and now she could finally be one of the people going “up and down.” She gripped the bars of her stroller like she was riding the wooden roller coaster at the PNE and kept asking as her head scanned the occupied blue seats, “Why are there so many people?”

Our destination was the newly opened park at Smithe and Richards streets downtown: sθәqәlxenәm ts’exwts’áxwi7 in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Squamish languages, meaning “Rainbow” park. The City of Vancouver’s website says this is the first park to be gifted a name by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

sθәqәlxenәm ts’exwts’áxwi7, meaning ‘rainbow’, was chosen for this place because the land where the park now sits was once forested with large trees and had many sources of water, including a marsh where the sun and mist would form rainbows.

I see the “rainbow” element integrated into the design of the playground through the multi-textured walkways that wrap around and over the park, with wheelchair accessible routes too. These walkways imitate rainbows that arch over the kids playing below. I was standing on one while I took this pic of my daughter bouncing on one of the two trampolines. The Indigenous public art banners waving in the wind echo this rainbow effect, adding height and colour to an already variegated landscape.

There are a lot of cookie cutter playgrounds in Vancouver (and probably any city) but this is not one of them. Its varying heights, structures, and integration into the streetscape caught my attention right away. Here is a park that promotes risky play, that considers parents as much as the kids, that offers a little something for everyone.

In researching risky play (which I am a fan of though it can scare me!), I came across this video that traces the history of “adventure playgrounds” that were originally known as “junk playgrounds” that began in Denmark in the aftermath of WWII. It’s fascinating.

The video gives 6 criteria that typically categorize an adventure playground:

• heights
• speed
• tools
• dangerous elements
• rough-and-tumble play
• the ability to disappear or become lost

While there were no tools or dangerous elements like hammers, nails, or loose bricks for kids to manipulate, this “Rainbow” park definitely contains the other criteria. You can tell it was equally designed for parents and caregivers by putting in a nearby coffee shop (Kafka’s) and wooden seating around the edges (with backrests!) that indicates parents stay on the perimeter while the centre area is for the kids (something the video discusses as well). That being said, the park is so inviting it’s hard for adults to stay on the edges, as evidenced by the daddy-daughter photo below (my family).

Freeform sculptures (some with footholds, others not) invite creative climbing and sliding. And you can only reach the top of these staggeringly high towers by climbing from the bottom all the way to the top. Sure, an adult could go up it but our bodies don’t fit through those holes as easily! Our daughter wasn’t interested in climbing these but she loved the lower slide, the roller slide, and the trampolines. Different structures appeal to different age groups, and to me, that’s a mark of a good playground when a variety of ages can enjoy it. And let’s not underestimate the simple power of a good hill to climb or ramp to run down. I saw children playing tag along the walkways and others in the spray pool cooling off.

If you’re in the Vancouver area and looking for other examples of adventure playgrounds, I’d recommend Terra Nova Rural Park in Richmond (the closest I can think of to the adventure playground model) and Douglas Park in Vancouver.

Do you have a favourite risky playground where you live or where you’ve visited? Would love to know of other examples!

The Great Empty vs. The Great Filling

As a UVic alumna, I receive their Torch magazine whose recent cover article features cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Robin Mazumder and his research on how cities affect our mental well-being.

For his PhD in psychology, his research focused on stress responses when people were dropped via virtual reality into two separate locations in central London: 1) next to a high-rise building and 2) next to a low-rise building.

I imagine the participants of the study being dropped into a high-rise scene like this for the first location. (Photo of NYC by me)

Not surprisingly, author Michael Kissinger summarizes:

What he found was that tall buildings make people uncomfortable when they’re surrounded by them. Conversely, people have less of a stress response when they’re in environments that are built at what’s considered “human scale,” or the European model where buildings tend to top out at five storeys. 

Reading this brought me back to my literature courses in university. In the early 20th century when the development of urban spaces was accelerating at a fast pace, German socialist Georg Simmel was similarly concerned about the affect of the city on an individual in his landmark essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” from 1903. In fact, he was the one who coined the term blasé, which Merriam-Webster defines as “apathetic to pleasure or excitement as a result of excessive indulgence or enjoyment.” It’s a paradox: to feel something so strongly that you end up not feeling anything at all.

Many moving parts on a typical street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris.

Simmel says that the extreme excess or intensification of stimuli in the city “agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all.” Examples of stimuli he gives include “the grasp of a single glance . . . each crossing of the street . . . [and] the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life.”

Bryant Park in NYC. Love this dynamic park nestled behind the public library.

I have to admit that I am a city lover. I sang New York’s praises after visiting it for the first time (well aware now that living there would likely be a very different experience). In BC, I once had a job in what some would consider an idyllic pastoral setting where sheep and cows grazed in fields outside my window, their bleating and mooing a lunchtime lullaby. But I longed for blinking streetlights and fast-moving things: cars, bikes, people. Looking back, I think I was drawn to what those fast-moving things represented: opportunities.

While I don’t live downtown and am not surrounded by high-rises, I do live in a city and enjoy venturing downtown because of the different pace of life it offers. When Vancouver was shut down early in the pandemic and on and off since then, I looked forward to roaming around Gastown only to be dismayed at how empty it was. The photographs from around the world in this New York Times article “The Great Empty” capture that melancholy well.

Gastown’s famous steam clock (photo by me). What is time anymore?

If I were a subject in Mazumder’s study, I wonder what my response would have been. If he had conducted his study both pre- and post-pandemic, would there be a significant difference? Would the long amounts of isolation and at-home time make a bustling city scene more attractive than normal? Would we be less stressed and more excited? Or would the long absence of this hustle and bustle trigger anew the anxiety of crowds and stimuli that we had forgotten we were used to?

Grand Central Station, NYC, back in 2011.

I have a chapbook out now called ‘Let Us Go Then’ that alludes to T.S. Eliot’s quintessentially modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that one could argue features a speaker (Prufrock) desperately trying to overcome the blasé. The first stanza of his poem comes to mind when I think about “The Great Empty.” Obviously Eliot is writing in a very different context than our current pandemic one, but he is addressing emptiness of another kind: emptiness with modern living and all of its “fillings” as I paradoxically call them in my final poem of the chapbook.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

“A patient etherized upon a table” and “half-deserted streets” strike an eerily familiar chord. I find a degree of solace in this world-weary speaker who presents as an urban, educated individual who is painfully unsure of the world he finds himself inhabiting (and where he fits in, as a result).

The speaker is longing for emotional, spiritual, and physical connection.

I joke that I never knew I was extroverted until the pandemic hit. Give me people! (another Paris photo)

This longing ties into Michael Kimmelman’s introduction to that New York Times article showing mesmerizing photographs of empty public spaces:

Their present emptiness, a public health necessity, can conjure up dystopia, not progress, but, promisingly, it also suggests that, by heeding the experts and staying apart, we have not yet lost the capacity to come together for the common good. Covid-19 doesn’t vote along party lines, after all. These images are haunted and haunting, like stills from movies about plagues and the apocalypse, but in some ways they are hopeful.

They also remind us that beauty requires human interaction.

Burrard SkyTrain Station, Vancouver.

Human interaction indeed. That’s what Robin Mazumder comes back to in the UVic article: designing cities that are at a human scale, where most necessities are met within a 15-minute walk or transit ride, where spaces foster mixed uses and diverse users that create opportunities for community—a good kind of filling, maybe even a great one.

A mixed-use space (Woodward’s atrium in Gastown, Vancouver) I wrote about for my Master’s research.

Love in the Rain

On our first night in Paris, my husband and I took an open-top boat ride along the Seine. It wasn’t long before the sky dumped sheets of rain on us and the wind gusted so strongly it flipped our MEC umbrella inside out, rendering it useless the rest of the trip. We were soggy, jet-lagged Shreddies arriving home to our Airbnb. Welcome to Paris.

Before the rain…(I don’t have an “after” photo).

One of the many bridges we cruised under was Le Pont des Arts, more commonly known as the “love lock bridge.” Many cities have their version of a love lock bridge, but Paris is perhaps the most famous. With close to a million locks hanging from the grilles, the City of Paris decided to remove them in 2015 after part of the railing collapsed under the weight (about 45 tonnes). They replaced the grilles with transparent panels.

Above you can see the transparent panels, but you can also see people’s determinism to continue the love lock tradition, which started in Paris around 2008. (This photo was taken in 2017.) Although you would think Paris would be the origin of this tradition given its moniker as the City of Love, it actually began at Most Ljubavi (“Bridge of Love”) in Serbia during WWI. You can read the story here, which is actually more tragic than romantic. Now locals and tourists alike attach padlocks to bridges around the world and throw the key into the water—a contemporary urban ritual for couples to declare their love and its permanence.

(FYI, it is illegal to put a lock on a bridge in Paris, though how strictly this is enforced is debatable given the picture I took above. For the record, we did not add one.)

A year after the grilles on Le Pont des Arts came down, a love lock sculpture in Vancouver went up. Couples had been affixing padlocks to Burrard Street Bridge, and for the same structural reasons as the City of Paris gave, the City of Vancouver also said no, this can’t go on. They did; however, provide an alternative: a public art sculpture that could hold the weight of thousands of padlocks.

You can see Love In the Rain (2016) by Bruce Voyce if you visit Queen Elizabeth Park, the highest point in Vancouver at 125 metres above sea level. The public chose this location from a number of recommended sites and it seems symbolic of love at its peak. (I’m sure this has been the setting of countless proposals—the first lock attached began with one).

Best view of Vancouver from Queen Elizabeth Park

Incidentally, my parents took their wedding photos in this park.

Four sets of couples embrace under umbrellas—their stainless steel frames the hooks on which the locks hang. A receptacle is located on site for people to throw their keys into (very Vancouver), with the purpose that the metal will either be recycled or melted down to use as part of another public artwork.

The human forms are meant to be ageless and genderless. The work “celebrates the shelter that love brings and the union that it forms,” according to a Park Board press release. On the artist’s website, Voyce writes that his sculpture “embodies love in the temperate rainforest.”

The umbrellas make the piece, in my opinion. Not only do they add height and visual interest, but they contextualize the artwork, answering the question, why this public artwork here? If Paris is the City of Love, Vancouver is the City of Rain.

I cannot help but think of a line in my own wedding vows: “to shower love and forgiveness like Vancouver rain.”

Now I am wondering for how many other couples is love linked to rain, fitting together like lock and key?

Do you have a “love in the rain” story?

Places to Play

Kids don’t need an invitation to play. I have two nieces and a nephew who take any opportunity to transform their beds into trampolines, couches into jungle gyms, boxes into forts, living rooms into dance floors. 

Adults, on the other hand, need to be told to play. In a world where speed and efficiency are rewarded, play is underrated but oh so necessary. 

Westlake Park, Seattle

This temporary art installation by Downtown Seattle Association invites people to do just that: take a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and play. Their website says they “offer a variety of daily games and activations – from ping pong to foosball.” When I was there the other weekend, I noticed a play area for kids, as well as portable library with books for kids and adults to enjoy.

In their other location, Occidental Square, they had a life-sized chess game. This square was really empty on a Monday morning at 9am, but I wonder how much traffic it gets other times. Do people respond to these efforts at interaction and creativity? Do you?

You can see the “PLAY” blocks in the far left corner of Occidental Square, Seattle

Seattle isn’t the only city encouraging its residents to play. I’ve encountered similar efforts in New York City and Amsterdam through public art, life-sized chess games, public pianos, and letters to climb.

Perhaps this sign is more popular with tourists (guilty), but fun nonetheless

Where there are life-sized letters, there are people wanting to climb them. Heck, there are people wanting to climb almost anything. These jellybeans that were in Vancouver’s Charleson Park are a prime example. I think some of the most effective public artworks are ones that can be touched. Humans are so hungry for contact. 

Love Your Bean by Cosimo Cavallaro in Charleston Park, Vancouver. This public artwork was a Vancouver Biennale project and has since been removed, sadly.

When I think of the word play, I think of a piano. Its presence in my various apartments over the years is akin to a good friend’s quiet constancy. For me, a piano is not just an instrument, but a physical space to unravel myself. I much prefer playing to my ears alone, but I appreciate the public pianos cropping up in virtually every city (or in Victoria’s case, along the beach where I played only to wave, wind, and husband). 

My favourite public piano so far, Victoria

Friends in Okotoks, AB

The above images all strike me as examples of placemaking, a word popular in urban planning spheres for the last few decades.

Project for Public Spaces, based in New York, has a concise article summarizing this hands-on approach to making neighbourhoods and cities more enjoyable places to live, work, and play.

With community-based participation at its center, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and well being.

I’ll share one last example from Seattle that literally appeared like a hole in the wall. I don’t know if it was a community-driven initiative, but it felt like it fulfills the last part of the above quote. I was walking to King’s Street Station from Occidental Square to catch the bus back to Vancouver when a sign on a gate reminiscent of a high-security prison stopped me. 

Say what? How could something beautiful hide behind such ugly doors? But when I stepped inside, I kind of liked this incongruity between outside and inside, catching me unawares. 

Just as adults need places to play, we also need places to rest like this Waterfall Garden Park. An oasis of quiet and calm. I sat on one of these chairs and listened to the music of the waterfall, feeling like I had found a diamond in the rough.

Do you have any stories like this of surprise urban retreats? What’s one of your favourite places to play or rest that you’ve encountered in a city? I’d love to hear!

Catching our Breath in Nice

It’s been a year since the Artist and I left for Europe. In looking back at my posts, I’ve realized I haven’t written about one of the eight places we visited. So, last but not least . . . Nice.

Nice felt like the Waikiki of France. Tropical. Laid-back. Beautiful views and turquoise blues. Hotels slung along the shore, such as Hotel Negresco with its signature pink dome.

Nice was a perfect place to catch our breath after the bustle of Paris. We had two nights here before moving on to the Cinque Terre. Our only agenda was to walk la Promenade des Anglais, explore le Parc de la Colline du Château (Castle Hill), and relax.

As you can tell by the photos, Nice is sunny and warm, even in October. We climbed the winding steps at the eastern end of la Promenade which brings you to the 16th-century Tour Bellanda, the only remaining part of a medieval castle that stood atop this hill (you can see it in the photograph above).

Castle Hill was the city’s original site. It was dismantled by soldiers during the French occupation under King Louis XIV in 1706. This limestone rock is a natural formation standing 93 metres tall. There are plenty of footpaths at the top, castle remnants, an impressive waterfall built in the 18th century, playgrounds, and cafés.

It’s a beautiful place to wander, have a picnic under a tree, and take in the views of la Baie des Anges (Bay of Angels) to the west and the Port of Nice to the east. You can also see inland to the red-tiled roofs of the city and the Provençal hills further beyond.

The cherry and cream-coloured Hôtel Suisse at the base of Castle Hill drew my attention with this plaque honouring James Joyce’s sojourn in the city, where he began Finnegans Wake. I’m wrapping up my project of writing a poem for every place we visited on our trip and this plaque provided the inspiration for my Nice poem which I’m quite excited about. It’s a departure from my usual style.

La Promenade is dotted with beaches. We couldn’t stay here and not hop in the water, though we got about as far as our knees before the wind proved too much. We found Cinque Terre a better/warmer spot for actually swimming in the Mediterranean.

We ate our favourite dinner of the whole trip in Vieux Nice at a restaurant called Le Tire Bouchon. We stumbled upon this place and felt especially lucky when a British couple at the table beside us told us that this is the best spot to dine in the city (apparently they come to Nice often and have tried a lot of restaurants). The Artist ordered steak and I had a lamb shank served on the creamiest bed of mashed potatoes. Quelle présentation!

There’s a wonderful flower and produce market called cours Saleya that we enjoyed wandering through and buying some fresh fruit. The streets in this old part of town never cease to surprise with their unexpected turns, oddly shaped and squished buildings, and peek-a-boo glimpses of architectural gems. And with colourful flags overhead, the streets exude vibrance and cheer. We didn’t know if it always looked this way or if there was a festival happening at that time, but we really loved the vibe in Vieux Nice.

Cycling the Arbutus Greenway

I had seen others doing it and it looked like fun. So today was the day I finally hopped on the Arbutus Greenway for myself.

This former railway track was recently converted into a paved pathway, connecting Marpole to Granville Island. It provides a designated north-south route for cyclists and walkers to get from one end of the City to another, something sorely lacking up until now.

I loved it. It was so convenient to hop on 70th Avenue in Marpole and ride to 41st and onto Southwest Marine Drive to meet up with some friends at UBC. On my way home, I took 16th Avenue back to the Greenway so I could cover most of the path. It’s 8.5 km long—here’s a map.

These vibrant poppies and purple wildflowers near 70th were a delight to see as I started out.

Community gardens line the right side of the path as you’re heading north. Someone had fun with these scarecrows.

I loved seeing parts of the City I hadn’t seen before. I was riding slowly up Vancouver’s spine, admiring houses that belong in a fairy tale, smiling at strangers standing in gardens with a hose in hand, and breathing in the scent of wildflowers spilling onto the pavement.

It was a leisurely ride devoid of traffic and steep hills! Most of the intersections had helpful signage that indicated to cross with pedestrians at the light, like you can see these cyclists doing at Arbutus and 16th.

Benches and portable toilets were available along the way. The biggest hill from this point riding south was winding through the Quilchena neighbourhood. But it provided some fabulous new lookout points, including slices of ocean.

Something to note is that there aren’t many trees along the trail so shade isn’t an option, which you really notice on hot days like today.

Between Nanton Road and Quilchena Park, these colourful rocks stopped me in my tracks. Their messages and the conversations they inspired were my favourite experiences along the route.

Painted all colours of the rainbow, they are as diverse as the people I saw using the path: cyclists, walkers, joggers, seniors, kids, families, rollerbladers, people in wheelchairs, skateboarders, you name it.

“Pretty cool, eh?” An oldish man spoke to me from the walking side of the path and I said, “Totally cool.” He pointed a little further down where a plaque explained this public artwork done by York House Grade 2 students, a Vancouver Biennale project.

I told him this was my first time on the path and he said he walks parts of it almost every day. “So it’s well used?” I asked. “Oh yeah,” he replied. He said it’s packed on the weekends and he’s particularly encouraged to see a lot of seniors walking with canes on it. He said many seniors don’t feel safe navigating heavy intersections, so this designated route gets more people out enjoying nature and the city who wouldn’t otherwise. I completely get that as a cyclist who doesn’t love riding on busy streets!

Near the sign, I spoke with another man who was admiring the rocks. He said this Greenway really was a case of “build it, and they will come.” Apparently it’s just a temporary path though with plans to make it into “a destination that fosters both movement and rich social interaction – inspired by nature and the stories of the places it connects” (from the City website). I kind of like it just as it is though, with the exception of adding more public art and trees.

I ended up having a third conversation with someone along the Greenway when I stopped at 57th Avenue to pick up a few things from Choices Markets. One of the Rainbow Rocks said “Make community” and these friendly encounters with strangers seemed to affirm the spirit of that message already, an experience I don’t take for granted in Vancouver.