Fighting for Space Read online

  “For the first several years here, I was one of the drug addicts on the 100 block of Hastings and on the corner in front of Carnegie Centre,” he says in a 1997 documentary called Down Here. “I had no life, I had no hope, I had nothing. I had done everything I could to end my life and destroy it. And yet here I am, much more alive than I ever thought I would be.”

  The Carnegie Community Centre is the heart of the Downtown Eastside and the 100 block is its soul. The grand old building at the corner of Main Street and East Hastings is built of Vancouver Island sandstone with imposing four-storey pillars on either side of its entrance. Those doors open onto the corner, and inside is a large lobby with an adjacent winding staircase. Stained-glass windows give it the feel of a church.

  Originally built as Vancouver’s main library, the Carnegie building was constructed between 1901 and 1903. When the city moved its books elsewhere in 1957, Carnegie was mostly left empty and fell into disrepair. Through the 1950s and ’60s, the commercial centre of the city moved southwest, contributing to a long decline of the Downtown Eastside. A 1965 report describes what the area that was once Vancouver’s centre had become: “Many people live here because they have little choice. Some are physically disabled and live solely on welfare assistance; some are pensioners eking out their allowances in the cheapest accommodation they can find. Some, by lack of skills, are virtually unemployable, and some live here simply because they enjoy the constant activity of the area. Compared to the rest of the city, few people here have any family ties. Many have acute personal problems—almost all are poor.”11

  Carnegie eventually reopened as a community centre in 1980. It was viewed as a major victory for the Downtown Eastside but didn’t slow the neighbourhood’s descent into poverty. By the time Osborn arrived in 1986, dealers had owned the corner of Main and Hastings for many years. An open-air drug market attracted a constant flow of seedy foot traffic.

  From that corner, the 100 block runs west. It’s a crowded strip of destitution, home to a number of single-room occupancy hotels, or SROs. The Downtown Eastside was and still is largely a collection of SROs, though that has begun to change with the arrival of gentrification in recent years. An SRO is a building characterized by small rooms, usually less than 250 square feet (twenty-two square metres), with shared bathrooms on each floor. In the early years of the twentieth century, this layout was fine for the lumberjacks for whom these hotels were built. The men stayed a few days, enjoyed city life, and then returned to British Columbia’s forests, where the booming logging industry was then in full swing. By the 1980s, however, most logging jobs were gone and the Downtown Eastside’s SROs were filled with the region’s mentally ill, physically disabled, drug users, and poor.

  In the neighbouring city of Coquitlam stands Riverview, a massive complex of buildings that opened in 1913 as the Hospital for the Mind. In the 1950s, it was home to a peak patient population of 5,500 people who struggled with a range of severe mental illnesses.12 In the decades that followed, the institutionalization of the mentally ill became increasingly unpopular in North America, and Riverview stopped taking new patients. Many argue that was for the best. Riverview was the sort of stereotypical institution that treated people poorly and led to a backlash against the entire concept of forced care. But as Riverview stopped taking new patients and was slowly decommissioned, the provincial government failed to build a new system of care for the mentally ill to take its place. The thousands of people who struggled with a mental illness and lacked family support ended up in the only place where they could afford housing or, failing that, where they were accepted on the streets and in the alleys: the Downtown Eastside.

  The neighbourhood’s downhill slide continued until 1993, when the Woodward’s department store closed its doors. This event is widely remembered as the Downtown Eastside’s arrival at rock bottom. The once middle-class shopping complex occupied an entire square block. When it went out of business, the majority of shops that lined Hastings Street closed shortly after, their windows boarded up. Some properties were left vacant, though dozens of pawn shops and beer parlours opened. The Downtown Eastside no longer had anything to offer the middle class.

  In 1999 a journalist with the New York Times visited and described it this way: “The area of no more than a dozen square blocks, with roughly 16,000 residents packed into various shelters, single-room-occupancy hotels and apartments, is the site of eighty percent of Greater Vancouver’s drug-related arrests, though it represents only three percent of the region’s population. Of the 16,000, about 6,000 are addicted to intravenous drug use. And with those numbers comes a darker statistic as well: with an HIV infection rate as high as fifty percent among the area’s intravenous drug users, according to the police, the Downtown Eastside had the highest rate in the developed world.”13

  Osborn took comfort in the rawness of the neighbourhood, in what he called its “soundtrack,” the sirens of police cars and ambulances, the shaky clacking of shopping carts pushed along the sidewalk, and the soft calls of drug dealers selling crack, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin.

  “Rock? Powder? Jib? Down?” they asked passersby. The same poem, over and over, all day and all night.

  The early 1990s were hard years for addicts in the Downtown Eastside. There wasn’t a single clinic in the neighbourhood and access to clean needles was severely restricted. Osborn recalled one weekend he spent in a flophouse injecting heroin with a group of gay sex-trade workers that he’d met on the street. “There would be, like, six of us lined up on this one raggedy needle,” he said. “How I dodged HIV, I have no idea.”

  Osborn’s opinion of heroin was never totally negative. Even in the years before he died, after he was clean for some time, he spoke fondly of the drug, arguing that for him, it had its uses. Heroin ended his frequent nightmares, let him sleep, and curbed suicidal thoughts that had followed him since he was just a little boy. “I felt good, I didn’t hate myself,” he said. “I felt this warmth in the pit of my gut, which had always been really cold.”

  Osborn maintained that it wasn’t the drug that does the most damage, but rather its criminalization. “Prohibition has made a nightmare of my life,” he said. “I was so screwed up. If I could have had heroin through those times, through those years, until I stabilized in some kind of way … my life would have been very different.” He did, however, dislike how the drug affected his ambition and, by extension, his poetry.

  “I was running back and forth on drugs and alcohol—on anything—and I just felt a complete failure with poetry,” Osborn said. “I wasn’t accomplishing what I had intended, which was to write a poem that could speak to another human being, as all those poets I read initially had spoken to me, had helped me to live, to go on.”

  By the mid-1990s, Osborn was doing better for himself than he acknowledged. In 1995, a book of his poetry called Lonesome Monsters was published to critical acclaim. It was followed by others that achieved similar success. He was also keeping a busy schedule of readings and playing in two bands that did well on a local level. His writing was gritty and deeply rooted in the neighbourhood in which he lived.

  “The one credo I have is just to write the truth,” he said. “What I see. And if someone says something, exactly what they say. That’s the one thing I figured I could do. I may not be the most gifted poet or anything like that, but at least I can tell the truth about what I see and what I hear. I made that an absolute vow.”

  Eventually, Osborn did achieve the one measure of success he sought more than any other.

  “I went on this reading tour around BC with some other poets,” he began. “We were way up north at Smithers, and there was a high school there. I’d written a poem called ‘When I was Fifteen,’ and it was about when I was fifteen years old and took more than 200 aspirin, trying to kill myself.” It wasn’t the typical sort of poem most people would pick for a reading at a high school, but Osborn explained it was a selection that was honest. After the reading, a young girl rushed
up to him, “just glowing, actually,” he continued. “And she said that she had, earlier that week, taken a great many aspirin trying to kill herself, and had just come back to school that day.”

  A teacher unlocked a door to a classroom where there was a photocopier so that Osborn could leave the girl with a copy of the poem he had read. “She told me about herself at some length,” he said. The girl explained that she felt alone and alienated. “My parents tell me I can’t be depressed because they give me everything,” she said.

  “When she was leaving, she was clutching the poem and was just radiant,” Osborn said. “And thinking about living, not about dying. I thought, ‘Finally, a poem has accomplished what I had attempted all those years before.’”

  10Bud Osborn, “the passion of the downtown eastside,” Hundred Block Rock (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999), p. 79.

  11Downtown East Side (Vancouver, BC: The City of Vancouver, 1965).

  12John Higenbottam, Into the Future: The Coquitlam Health Campus: A Vision for the Riverview Lands (Coquitlam, BC: City of Coquitlam, 2014).

  13Murray Whyte, “Fighting Addiction by Documenting Its Wretchedness,” New York Times, November 7, 1999.

  Chapter 3

  A Chance Encounter

  In 1986, Mark Townsend was a bit of a punk. His hair was tied in scraggly dreadlocks, bleached, and then dyed pink and blue. He was tall, thin, and always wore skinny black jeans paired with a leather jacket. In June of that year, he was on his way back to London after several months travelling in Northern Ireland. On a warm spring day in a quiet country town called Frinton on Sea, he and his friend Steve were walking to the post office along Connaught Avenue when they bumped into a young woman from Canada who recognized Steve as an old friend from childhood.

  “She was called Liz,” Townsend says with affection. “She was looking for a place to stay in London. So I said, ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ And she did, the very next morning.”

  Liz Evans was a twenty-year-old nursing student at the University of Ottawa. She had long, dark hair and seldom wore jewellery or much makeup, if any. She was a bit of a tomboy, with a look and demeanor that was gentle while strong. On vacation in Frinton to visit her mother, Evans had plans to live in London for the summer, working with a Christian mission serving meals to the poor.

  “I was having a crisis of faith,” Evans remembers. “I came up against the hard, cold reality that Christianity was incapable of meeting people where they were at. It really upset me. I didn’t like the church anymore, so I couldn’t go and do this thing that I had committed to. I arrived in my mom’s hometown and I didn’t even know if I believed in God anymore.”

  There on Connaught Avenue in idyllic Frinton on Sea, Evans poured her heart out. “I just started ranting about how I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t have a job in London and I was having this faith crisis and I didn’t know who God was anymore and I didn’t know what the meaning of life was anymore and I was just so angry.”

  Liz Evans in 1992, roughly a year after she started at the Portland Hotel.

  Photo: Steve Bosch / Vancouver Sun

  Townsend thought it was all a bit funny, but the two hit it off.

  “I went back to Steve’s house,” Evans continues, “and we stayed up and talked for hours about politics and God and religion, and listened to tapes.” The next morning, Townsend and Steve were waiting outside her mother’s house.

  “I got in a car and drove with them to London and ended up living with them in their flat,” Evans says. “They had a big house and tons of roommates. We all lived in East London for the summer, and I fell totally in love with Mark.”

  Townsend, however, was dating a girl named Mary. It was quite a while before he shared Evans’s feelings, but the two immediately became best friends. “I would sneak up into his loft each night and we would just spend the whole night talking. We were really good friends for a long time.”

  The house was a tall and narrow brick structure in an area of London called New Cross. “Mark had a lot of friends and kind of a crazy community of people who came by the house all the time,” Evans remembers. “They were all interesting characters … It was great. We did a lot of weird things.”

  Townsend was employed at The Old Vic Theatre, working in the stage-lighting department on a production of Bernard Shaw’s “Widower’s House.” He found the work exciting but, like Evans, he sought something with a larger purpose. “It was a very meaningful play,” Townsend says. “But I thought, ‘Can this really change things? Can it make things a little better for people? No.’ And it was in that moment that I thought, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this.’”

  Money was short that summer. Evans worked in a cafeteria at the Greenwich Maritime Museum “for about a minute” before she decided she couldn’t bear it. They survived on tea and toast but were never bored. Semi-famous stars of the London underground occasionally dropped by the house. They travelled to Bristol, hitchhiked all the way to the south of France, and spent a weekend camping in an old tent on the outskirts of Cornwall. The summer flew by.

  Mark Townsend in 1991, shortly after he moved from the UK to Vancouver.

  Photo: Mark Townsend

  “It was the ’80s in London with goths and parties in church basements and weird movie projections everywhere,” Evans remembers. “It all seemed so exciting to me, coming from nursing school in Ottawa.”

  Then Evans returned to Canada for the next semester at school, “very depressed.” She spent the next two years completing her nursing degree and working part-time at two women’s shelters in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill neighbourhood. She contemplated further education in psychiatry but found she didn’t like the mental-health professions, or at least not the way they were practiced at the time. “I found it depressing and dehumanizing,” she says.

  Without strong ties to Ottawa, Evans and her roommate decided to move west, to Vancouver. Meanwhile, Townsend was trying to convince her to move to London (despite his relationship with Mary). But Evans had just spent four years working to obtain a degree in nursing, and it would go to waste if she moved to the United Kingdom, where it wasn’t recognized.

  Common sense won out. She moved to Vancouver and took a job in the emergency department at Vancouver General Hospital. That was the summer of 1989. Townsend would follow her there a couple of years later. Back in London, he had developed an activist streak.

  Townsend’s family comes from an area of Bristol called St. Paul’s. It’s a poor working-class, multi-ethnic inner-city suburb that takes pride in itself. It’s St. Paul’s to which Townsend gives credit for his inclination to rebel. In the spring of 1980, he recalls, a force of more than 100 police officers was sent into the neighbourhood to raid the Black and White Café, a notorious drug den run by immigrants from Jamaica. Police trucks blocked each end of the street and officers poured forth. More than a thousand St. Paul’s youths engaged in a violent standoff with police.

  “The community defended the café against the police, and the police were actually chased out,” Townsend says. He wasn’t at the Black and White Café that day, but he recalls hearing about the riot and feeling that the protesters’ victory over the police emboldened him to challenge authority.

  The same year, Townsend’s younger brother, Glen, entered his freshman year at Aberystwyth University. The semester had just begun when he suffered some sort of a mental breakdown. Townsend was only twenty-two at the time and away at the University of London, but his mother called him and asked for his help. Glen had been transported back to Bristol and admitted to Barrow Gurney Hospital, an old-fashioned psychiatric institution that had fallen into disrepair some two decades earlier. It was an isolated place in the forest. “The doctors are there, and they’re all very nice at the beginning,” he says. “Then they tell me about the treatment, which is going to be electro-convulsive therapy.”

  Showing a will, persistence, and bit of a temper that would terrorize political opponents many years la
ter, Townsend spent the next twenty minutes locked in an argument with the psychiatrist overseeing his brother’s treatment. “I kick up such a fuss,” he says. By the time Townsend was finished, not only was his brother no longer going to receive electro-convulsive therapy, but he was no longer going to remain at Barrow Gurney Hospital at all.

  His brother, who had locked himself in a bathroom and remained uncommunicative throughout the ordeal, was transferred to another, more modern facility where he received therapy and fully recuperated. But Townsend never forgot the situation in which he found Glen at Barrow Gurney. “I saw what a pile of shit the system was, a system that thinks it knows what it’s doing but doesn’t.”

  Ten years later, on March 31, 1990, thousands of Britons across the country took to the streets in what became known as the Poll Tax Riots. The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher was about to implement a major set of tax reforms that many criticized as saving money for the rich while increasing the burden placed on the lower classes.

  Townsend remembers the day as if he was at the front of a crowd of 20,000, marching up Langham Place in Central London to the doors of the all-mighty British Broadcasting Corporation. “We felt like we were leading the crowd,” he says, chuckling. “So we decided, let’s go to the BBC and broadcast that we had taken over the country. We ran up the steps and tussled with the security guards. We looked behind us, and this mob just stood at the bottom of the stairs at Langham Place. It was just me and my friend inside with all the security. So we turned and ran away.”

  Townsend recalls the day as a learning experience. “I thought, ‘Well, that sums up how it all works. Change is a tough thing to get.’”

  Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Evans quickly grew disillusioned with the job she had only just started. At the city’s largest hospital, she worked in the emergency psychiatry and assessment unit, seeing patients who were brought there in the depths of their mental-health crises. She hated how the system categorized and broke people down to nothing more than symptoms and solutions. “People were reduced to labels and to a disease model, and so the problems that you were able to address were not really the whole person’s problems; they were a tiny fraction of an issue,” Evans says. Worse, she noticed that when the hospital could not address a person’s mental-health issues, that patient was simply ejected from the system. “They would literally give up on people, and that was their MO. ‘I can’t do anything with this person. There is no outcome that is worth my time. So I can write them out of my caseload.’”