Falling for Lampposts and Leaves

One of my favourite parts about exploring a new city is stumbling upon public artworks. I have a Coquitlam address but live within walking distance to more amenities in Port Moody, including a small neighbourhood park (and I mean small!)

When we moved from Vancouver to Coquitlam a year ago, I was rather dismayed that Corbeau Park was the nearest one to walk to, especially after enjoying the gargantuan (by comparison) Memorial South Park practically in our backyard.

And yet my almost-four-year-old is surprisingly content with what the playground offers. And me? I have grown to like its smallness and calmness in the midst of a busy intersection. The park is aesthetically framed by a creek, trees, and brick-accented townhouses that have a European flair to them. Mosaics along the sidewalk and lampposts add visual interest and contribute to making this small, easily overlooked and crowded corner of Dewdney Trunk Road and St Johns Street an oasis with character (and benches!)

Speaking of giving a place character, I am especially fond of this lamppost at Lafarge Lake (an example of functional public art). It reminds me of Lumière (the talking candelabra) in Beauty and the Beast. I wish there were more of these surprise lampposts scattered around the lake’s perimeter, but as far as I’m aware, this is the only one. Can’t you just picture yourself reading a book under its canopy, the post’s lanky steel body coming to life when you’re not looking and meandering down to the water’s edge? (I took this picture on a hot summer day, which is probably the only reason why my mind jumps to “sun shade” rather than “rain cover”).

I’ve been noticing lampposts lately. Now that summer is retreating and fall is arriving with aplomb, there is colour everywhere. Leaves wrap themselves around lampposts like scarves. This one greets you along the path from Castle Park in Port Coquitlam, over the Mary Hill Bypass, and down to the Fraser River.

And look at this wall of ivy framing our own path down to a basement suite which, when the light hits just right, makes even that downward descent (with carseats in tow) look magical.

‘ll leave/leaf you with other shots of flaming reds seen at Rocky Point Park in Port Moody.

What a glorious season, eh? And it never gets old.

Leisure at Lafarge Lake

This past week, I was getting bored walking my 3-month-old twins around our suburban neighbourhood. I needed something more interesting, more city life humming around me. And then I remembered that one of the reasons we chose the rental we have in Coquitlam is its proximity to the SkyTrain. Not so much out of bravery but desperation for a change of scenery, I put one babe in a carrier, buckled the other into a single stroller, and walked to Inlet Centre to catch the Millennium Line eastbound to the last stop: Lafarge Lake-Douglas. (For some reason, public transit felt less intimidating than buckling two babies into car seats, hauling them up our formidable basement steps, and driving somewhere).

Here we go!

I was an urban flâneuse again, reading people (à la David Zeiroth in his recent poetry book) and spaces in my new-to-me city, a city I might be exploring more during this maternity leave than if I was still working.

My favourite lamppost. Wish all the ones around the lake were as charming as this!

Mostly everyone knows Lafarge Lake for its spectacular Christmas light display. Located in Town Centre Park, the lake is one of many sights and amenities that also includes a track and field (where I competed at track meets as a kid), tennis courts, sand volleyball courts, a playground, spray park, amphitheatre, and Evergreen Cultural Centre, to name a few.

Lights at Lafarge in January 2023.

The man-made lake is great in summer too. I watched kids in canoes shriek in delight as they paddled under the fountain while I ate some delicious ice cream (cookie dough and chocolate) from Rocky Point Ice Cream.

Watching the canoes play under the fountain.

Pretty much a perfect day.

I looped around the lake and saw a young boy jump up and down with excitement when he caught a fish (the lake is stocked with rainbow trout from March to November). I chatted with a lovely stranger who asked about my boys and genuinely seemed to care about how I was doing. As I looked around, I was struck by how many people came here to play.

Since I work at an art gallery (when not taking care of babies), I always love visiting other ones. Unfortunately, the Art Gallery at Evergreen was closed for installation but I did get to wander around the stunning performing arts lobby.

Evergreen Cultural Centre interior.

I was surprised there wasn’t more public art in and around the building but I did enjoy stopping to reflect on Janet Wang‘s two-part window installation.

Evergreen Cultural Centre exterior.

To Exit is to Enter shows a large portrait of the artist turning away and moving up a stairwell. The didactic panel says:

Is she coming or going? Was she asked to leave or invited in? What lies beyond? With these questions in mind the doorway becomes a portal, a mysterious passageway into the unknown. This metaphor continues Wang’s exploration of identity from her perspective as a second-generation Chinese-Canadian settler, artist and mother. Like many people living in this country, the notion of longing is complicated by histories of exclusion.

If you have Instagram (unlike me), you can point your phone at the QR code and activate the filter. Curious what this would look like. Anyone seen it who could tell me? Does the figure move?

Janet Wang, To Exit is to Enter, 2023, inkjet print on vinyl, augmented reality animation.

The other part of the installation also features a door, showing a procession of figures moving in parallel lines, with one line heading towards a yellow door. The didactic panel talks about the Chinese Exclusion Act from 1923-1947, a federal policy that banned Chinese immigration to Canada. With this history in mind, the artwork brings up themes of belonging, identity, migration, and conformity, even in the present day. Are the figures walking willingly or involuntarily? Rather than a golden archway (or country) of opportunity, I interpret the door ominously. It reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time where all the residents of Camazotz move and speak the same way because they are controlled by IT, a gigantic disembodied brain. Doors are liminal, in-between spaces that typically represent change, hope, and new beginnings, but as this artwork shows, that is not necessarily the case.

Janet Wang, To Exit is to Enter, 2023, inkjet print on vinyl, augmented reality animation.

The artwork doesn’t really jive with the leisure and play surrounding the lake on a summer day, but perhaps it is all the more striking because of this incongruity. And like good public art, it got me thinking. It made me aware of the privilege I enjoy as a Canadian citizen whose government gives mothers a 12-or 18-month maternity leave and as a white settler who hasn’t faced policies of exclusion like the artist and people of minority groups. It also made me grateful for where I live (despite the soaring coast of living) and my capacity to walk out the door of my home with babies and do outings like this.

Lovely view on a lovely day.

I wonder how long this artwork will stay up and what other installation might be there the next time I visit. Any ideas for other destinations or experiences to try with the twins over the next year?

The Writing on the Wall

After nine years in Vancouver, I am saying goodbye. This is the city where I moved to in my mid 20s, single and living in an apartment all to myself for the first time, freelance writing by the corner window and loving it. 

The golden hour at Fremlin St & 70th Ave

It’s where I looked for poems and found them on skyscrapers, rocks, streets, chairs, gravestones, and strangers who stopped.

Vancouver Novel by João Loureiro at Point Grey Road and Collingwood St

Echoes by Michel Goulet at Kits Beach

Children’s rock artwork along the Arbutus Greenway

Where I had an amazing job for one and a half years at Regent College and felt the strong welcome and support of that community. Where I met a man who asked good questions, including the unforgettable, life-altering one, “Will you marry me?” 

Reader, I said yes.

Where I made new friends who feel old now, like they’ve always been around.

Where my almost 3-year-old daughter took her first breaths, cries, laughs, steps, and lessons in being alive. She’s learning there is beauty and joy and delight in the world but also pain and sadness and uncertainty. Why is the landlord selling our house? Once the landlord sells it, can we come back and live in it? Why is someone else moving into our home? But where will we live?

She, like my husband, asks good questions. Questions I don’t usually have good answers for. Adam and I have been asking a lot of our own this season: Why is Vancouver (actually most of the Lower Mainland) so unaffordable? Why does it seem to do nothing about its housing crisis? Does it not care that so many people, particularly families, are forced to leave?

Granville Island

I think of Maggie Smith and her ever resonant poem “Good Bones.” “I am trying / to sell them the world,” she says about her children, like any new parent. What memories will Madeleine tell of Vancouver, of our house near the park with the wild garden out front?

Shortly after moving into that Marpole apartment, I walked the neighbourhood and saw my name on a building. My name’s not terribly common, so this stood out to me. So much so I wrote a whole blog post about it. It was my welcome message to Vancouver, saying I belong.

After months of searching for a new place to live, applying for 20+ co-ops, viewing 11+ places around Metro Vancouver, lining up with 40+ people stretching the length of a city block to view an apartment that charged for a parking spot each month and didn’t even have bike storage, encountering more than one Craigslist scam and landlords who don’t take good care of what they own, I am relieved to say Adam and I have found a new home we like in a city we didn’t expect, but one I hope to love in different ways than I have loved Vancouver.

somewhere along Main St

The day we drove to look at the place, Adam pointed out an inscription on a concrete barrier at the corner of Lougheed Highway and Pitt River Road: WE LOVE YOU CHARLENE. I suspected it was to mark the site of a tragic car accident, and that sadly is the case. But it stayed with me, just like the Marpole sign did. Because how often is your name written into the landscape? Not only that, but written in stone? 

I, like my daughter, am sad (mixed with other emotions) at all that we are leaving in Vancouver, but this unexpected message—so personal, so intimate—felt like a direct welcome to Coquitlam. You belong here now. 

Time to step through a different door. Goodbye shiny Vancouver.

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?

A Tale of Two Trees

I live near Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver. When my daughter was young enough that she was taking her naps on me, I often walked its paths, reading the odd gravestone, admiring the beautiful trees, composing poems in my head. Now my daughter takes all her naps in a crib and I leave her with my husband to run those paths, admire the beautiful trees (especially this season), and compose poems in my head.

While there recently, I ran by some art installations that compelled me to stop. Two trees: one dressed in red, the other in white.

The first tree is called REDress and brings attention to the 1200+ missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. It’s a response/continuation of artist Jaime Black’s REDress project, in which she hangs red dresses in various public settings. She writes on her website:

The project has been installed in public spaces throughout Canada and the United States as a visual reminder of the staggering number of women who are no longer with us. Through the installation I hope to draw attention to the gendered and racialized nature of violent crimes against Aboriginal women and to evoke a presence through the marking of absence.

It is not an accident the dresses are red. Red is for blood. Red is for love. Red is for anger. Red is for warning. Red is for stop, look, pay attention.

The other tree’s branches hung with white baby carriages, fabric stitched taut over stick frames, weightless and rocking in the wind. The installation was next to the infant’s cemetery, where each stone in the river commemorates a baby lost. There are many stones in the river. The oldest one I saw was inscribed with the date 1902.

It is not an accident the carriages are white. White is for innocence. White is for milk. White is for purity. White is for a fadeout screen in a film. White is for ghosts. White is for baby shoes. White is for a blank page, an empty photo album.

Two trees dressed in grief. People have remarked that running through a cemetery is creepy. I have never experienced that feeling until the day I saw those red and white trees in broad daylight. They were haunting.

They have become more haunting after reading theologian James Cone’s 2011 book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone connects the cross Jesus died on with the trees that thousands of Black people died on in the United States because of white supremacy. Cone writes:

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus.

While not ignoring the historical and theological differences between the cross and the lynching tree, Cone concludes:

The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land. In this sense, black people are Christ figures, not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice.

These are powerful, haunting words. Reading Cone’s short and accessible book (for non-theologians like me) was illuminating, horrifying, and necessary. Just like the red dresses and white carriages render presence through absence in Mountain View cemetery, Cone writes for America (particularly Christian America) to remember what it has all too easily forgot, ignored, or even justified.

He reminds us of the strange fruit hanging from trees that Billie Holiday inscribed on the ears of anyone who listened to her sing this indictment.

Listening to the song and looking at the cemetery tree photos, I wonder what the late Cone would say about Canada’s collective violence towards our Indigenous peoples, people we have sought to kill, assimilate, dehumanize. We have our own strange fruit, our river of stones, our Highway of Tears to reckon with.

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!