If You Lived at the Astoria Hotel, You’d Already Be Home!
Photographed April 4 at 11:52 p.m. in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
I often drive past this hotel on my way home from downtown Vancouver. I pulled over to capture this image last Friday because the lights were beautiful in the dark of night.
The Astoria Hotel is in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the DTES, located in postal code1 area V6A 1R3. For over half a century, V6A 1R3 has been one of the poorest postal codes in all of Canada. Homeless people sleep on the ground on virtually every block in this neighbourhood. The drug addicted are everywhere, too, often standing doubled over one-hundred-eighty degrees, in the thrall of their addictions.
When driving past windows of the single-room occupancy units of the Astoria Hotel, one is able to pull over and buy an oat milk beetroot latte for $7.50, or a small cup of soft-serve affogato for $8, just nearby. Affogato is cold gelato drowned 2 in hot espresso.
While in the neighbourhood one is also able to pick up a $169.95 thirty-millilitre bottle of hemp oil for one’s anxious dog, or, for only $35, three pounds of free range, fair trade, and hormone free frozen meats for their “fur babies.”3
The mental health centre and police station are just as accessible as the small-batch brewery and the spa with the reflexology sauna. Whatever that is.
V6A 1R3 has something for everyone. That’s gentrification for you.
I took this photo while driving back from a very different Vancouver that is only a fourty-five minute walk from there, where I had just met Barry Sonnenfeld (and his wife) at the Revue Stage on Granville Island. Mr. Sonnenfeld sat for an interview with Tom Charity to talk about his career in film.
Mr. Sonnenfeld was funny and sharp. Just as you’d hope. His wife, Susan, Sweetie, even autographed his book for me. She lived up to her name.
The talk was part of the Vancouver Writers Fest, which is a pretty great festival: small venue, seating ten feet from the dais, casual format, book signing, real conversation after.
Naomi Klein is coming to the Chan Centre out at UBC on April 26, also as part of the festival. Worth going, if you can. I don’t get paid for saying this. I just like the festival.
That’s it for today. Best, G. A. P.S. Appreciate this work? Buy the cat a coffee and keep it going.
Same thing as a ZIP code.
Affogato derives from the Italian verb affogare, meaning “to drown,” a reference to the act of pouring hot espresso over gelato.
Fur baby. If you ever hear me use this term unironically, shoot me. It’s the worst.