Mount Pleasant was my preferred neighbourhood to begin my relocation back to the west coast. I had visited a handful of times for day trips to Vancouver when I lived in Victoria, which started a trend of when I visited a new neighbourhood, I’d google where the hipsters lived. At the time, it seemed trendy but not too busy, a long but doable walk to downtown, and full of parks and some nice houses, no hi-rises. When I had a choice of airbnbs for the city, I chose this neighbourhood, even when the host was sketchy.
A lot changes in four or five years when an area is undergoing gentrification. The first clue should have been that, when moving four years after my last airbnb trip, we could only find a hi-rise that was both pet friendly and only a little over budget, both of which were contradictions to the neighbourhood I was imagining. The inside of the building we ended up renting looks cool, but I wonder how much the rent was inflated because of it.
Looking at some compilations of average rent prices by neighbourhood, Mount Pleasant has somehow become the most expensive. I guess I wasn’t the only one who wanted to relocate there. There are still neighbourhoods where it’s more expensive to buy, but that could be because there aren’t as many mansions in the area as other places. It’s yet another version of the gentrification story of folks who have lived there for decades being pushed out, and increasingly people who work in the area have to commute from outside the city for work.
The reasons why the area has become so expensive are obvious. It’s one of two neighbourhoods in the city that are full of breweries. It has numerous city parks that are gathering places for various groups of people the non-rainy months; even the most plain parks would be extravagant in a lot of other cities. Its main thoroughfare is Main Street, which is regularly named one of the coolest strips in the country and even the world. (It’s cool, but if you’re expecting ‘best in the world’, you’ll be underwhelmed). It’s in the middle of the city, so you can access pretty much all the other good areas without too much effort. It’s not far from all three Skytrain lines.
It also feels like a very alive neighbourhood. It has a somewhat unique mix of having all the things you could want while still feeling like a community. There are a lot of people walking around. There are lots of local businesses. Murals decorate the sides of buildings. Things open later than you’d expect and closer earlier than you’d expect. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of fairy gardens at the base of trees on side streets.
There are no beaches – you don’t get those until two neighbourhoods west, in Kits – but in most of the neighbourhood there’s a hell of a view of the North Shore mountains. It helps that the neighbourhood is on a hill (hence the Mount in Mount Pleasant, I imagine). It peaks around 16th, and walking down the hill I couldn’t help staring, even when I got used to it.
I’ll miss the naked view of the north shore mountains down Main Street from my most common walking route between 10th and 16th. Main curves around 17th, and below 10th it’s still a pretty steep incline, so these blocks really are the best look. On the quieter side streets there’s no unobstructed view unless you’re in the top floor of a building, and even on the streets that run north-south, there are sometimes things doesn’t give you as good of a look as on Main, although St. George, Ontario and other streets have some good pockets too. You have to go all the way to Cambie, the western boundary of the neighbourhood, to have another really good look, and at that point it’s more of hi-rises with mountains in the background than the full mountain view.
There’s a spot shortly after Main curves a bit to the east on 18th, next to Anh and Chi (rated one of the best bathrooms in Canada apparently), where you can look down an alley for a pretty nice view too. There are other little peeks throughout the neighbourhood as well. If only Main wasn’t so busy it would be more enjoyable, but at the same time there’s something special about walking home from errands with the view staring you in the face amidst all the other people around you going to expensive thrift stores and donut shops.
Once when I visited when living in Victoria, Justin and I and a friend of mine we stayed with were at Budgies and Justin asked a cool nearby spot to grab a drink. They described a place with no sign, only a red light, where you would go into a door and down some stairs. It was behind a gas station. It took us a long time to find, but when we did, it felt like we had discovered something. I don’t think the bar exists anymore, because I don’t think you could hide it from Google these days, but I found the exact spot where it was, memories flooding back.
Mount Pleasant is commonly referred to as the “first suburb” of Vancouver. It was designed around the streetcar line at the time and contains multiple references to street cars, like a historical station on Kingsway and East Broadway that often gets its glass smashed in. It’s way past a suburb now, though it retains some of its industrial use of the past, particularly in the northernest most blocks that connect it to downtown, demarcating the separation of the neighbourhoods.
The neighbourhood, and Vancouver in general, does a good job at keeping traffic off the side streets, which makes it quieter and less busy where houses are. However, it means that the major streets are packed. I lived on one of the busiest parts of the neighbourhood, flanked by what are probably the two busiest east-west streets and the two busiest north-south streets for car traffic in the whole city. It’s strange to me that you can have one of the coolest enclaves with side-by-side storefronts but on a seven-lane street. The patios, and walking in general, would be a lot more ‘pleasant’ if the traffic were curtailed, but in a city like Vancouver without a highway running through it, it’s going to be hard to change that unless cars are significantly reduced or re-directed.
The neighbourhood feels very social, with small groups of people filling out the parks and other public spaces in addition to the restaurants and stores. Depending on my mood, sometimes I think that’s lovely, and other times it makes me feel lonely. There are passages between streets, sometimes alleys (called laneways) or nicer, you can use to mix up the views.
Even in the year that I lived there, there were numerous restaurant closures and business changes. I lament the eventual loss of what are probably now throwback places like Budgie’s, whose vibe either reminds me of what the neighbourhood was like before its late-stage gentrification or what I associate with it: reasonably priced, friendly with a bit of a counter-cultural vibe, and vegetarian. I wonder if Budgies was ever seen as a gentrifier.
In a lot of ways, even though it’s not on the heavily dense downtown peninsula, Mount Pleasant encapsulates the way I think a lot of people think of Vancouver: hip, left-leaning and expensive, but without as much of the ever-worsening homelessness and poverty crisis that ripples through the downtown. Even though I don’t think it’s quite as perfect as either it was or how I imagined it, when I walk downtown, I don’t understand why anyone would choose to live there instead of Mount Pleasant. I guess downtown has the allure, but I would find it hard to enjoy all it has to offer while I’m walking over bodies littering the streets. Maybe you get used to it, and I don’t know that it’s any more ethical to just live in a different neighbourhood, but aside from maybe the West End, the core downtown feels a lot less like a home and a lot more for wandering tourists and a smacks-you-in-the-face suffering.
I think a certain amount of future planning is necessary to get where you want to go. The danger is relying on a vision of the future that is necessarily inaccurate, since you don’t know how you’re going to feel about your day-to-day even if you achieve the exact path you planned out. Even more, there is so much you can’t control, like how places inevitably change, and how you relate to them. The Mount Pleasant I envisioned only existed the moments where I was there and in the ways my brain distorted it to suit my ideas. The place, although still beautiful and with much to recommend it, has faded through subtle daily changes, probably unnoticed except in retrospect if spending every day there, like when someone’s hair grows longer or gains weight.
Increasingly I think the neighbourhood has become a destination, and I still enjoy visiting on some weekends to pick up beer, run errands or get specific food. It’s not quite the same as living within it, waking up every day and navigating it, but it also feels less lonely now that I don’t have an implicit expectation that I am part of a community or group when I, for the most part, only walked by and witnessed those experiences without feeling like I was fully partaking, without a group of friends to sit in Dude Chilling with on a Friday night.
I got tired of the noise of traffic that permeated up through my closed windows, but never the views from my balcony. Through the smallest window in my apartment there was a view of the North Shore mountains, and if you went on the balcony, you’d have a more fulsome view. I always wished I was facing the North more and that I had wall-sized windows in that direction so I could always stare, which just goes to show that people always want more even if they have a slice of beauty more than most.
Moving away from a place means that the way it exists currently is without you and is no longer home. You must come to terms with that. The time in which you were there will always be home, but that interaction is past tense. Going home carries a nostalgia, regardless of whether the memories are good or bad, or more likely, mixed. These places burrow a place within us and fill up that space for as long as they’re remembered, and even longer, since they’ve permanently altered your body from the time they co-existed with you in a place called home.
describing space 