Online Only: Peter Valing’s dinner with Bob, the ex-carnie.the balmoral
I check into the Balmoral Hotel on the first day of summer. The lobby is tiny and hot and swarming with flies. “Are you staying a day or a month? ” asks the receptionist through a slot in the Plexiglas. “A month,” I reply, and he begins to fill out the registration. While he writes, I read the house rules: “Guests allowed upstairs with two pieces of ID. No guests after 6 p.m. No throwing things out the windows. No smoking in the elevator…”

“I hand the receptionist $380, and he hesitates with my change. “$375, right? ” He responds by pushing $5 through the slot. I shove the bill deep into my pocket alongside my last $130, the remainder of a month’s welfare stipend at the time, and my budget for my time here.

Two steps and I’m in the elevator, squeezed in beside an old man. We’re both bound for the seventh floor. He smokes a hand-rolled cigarette on the way, a flouting of the rules that thankfully masks the stench of the urine-steeped linoleum. “Seventh heaven,” he mumbles when the elevator jerks to a halt. I let out a nervous laugh. The corridor looks anything but heavenly.

I jiggle open the sticky lock on my door and feel some relief. The window is bare, and the bed squeaks at a mere glance, but it won’t be bad as long as I keep my shoes on. Someone has even decorated: five hot rod posters are pasted to the walls. I run water in the sink and adjust the shard of mirror to my height. After unpacking my two-burner stove, I make myself a cup of tea. Then I put my shoulder into the wooden frame, forcing the window open.

Vancouver is a young city with a young skyline. My view, however, is of its history, bathed golden in the setting sun. Across from me are the Carnegie Centre and the Roosevelt Hotel, two century-old buildings of brick and stone. The Carnegie was once a library, then a museum, then it was boarded up, and now it serves as a community centre. The Roosevelt was long ago converted from a hotel into single-room occupancy (sro) housing. Curtains blow out from the windows, and I notice that others, too, are watching the street from above.

There’s plenty to see: rooftop birds nesting, Chinese men playing cards in a den above an abandoned grocery, and crack and heroin being bought and used in the alley between the Carnegie and the Roosevelt. The “Lane of Shame,” as the police call it, is part of a maze of sidewalks, back streets, and parks that make up the area’s open-air drug market.

The drugs, however, are only one dimension of the Downtown Eastside that interests me. There are many dimensions, and above all there is the whole — the community — and the degree of disconnect between the people who live here and the world beyond its fifteen-block radius. Scores of journalists have exposed the troubles here, and an army of politicians, academics, social workers, activists, clergy, and police have attempted to address them. Some fifty charitable organizations work the dtes, tending to its approximately 8,000 low-income residents (half the area’s population). The Downtown Eastside remains wild and depressed in many ways, but not for want of trying.

the Carnegie
The cornerstone at the base of the portico at the Carnegie Centre reads March 29, 1902. Since then, the building and its inhabitants have witnessed constant change, documenting and even mythologizing the neighbourhood over the years. In the lobby, situated on a wall amid numerous missing-person posters, hangs a timeline of the area. It begins at a peculiar spot: “25,000 years ago, the weight of a giant ice sheet, one mile thick, pressed the Downtown Eastside 1,000 feet under sea level.” Over millennia, the ice receded until “11,000 years ago, the dtes slowly rebounded from the sea.

“I smoke a cigarette on the veranda, use the courtesy phone to check in with my wife, and wind up in the library. There, a very pregnant woman shuffles about with an armload of books. Dark-rimmed glasses, pulled-back hair — the librarian, no doubt.”