The Slow Death of the Best Block in Kitsilano

I've been keeping track of the comings and goings in this city for almost a decade now.
My neighborhood of Kitsilano has seen some of the most dramatic changes. I'll list some of the more interesting newcomers in an accompanying post but first on a sadder note, it's time to say a fond farewell to Duthie's and note the demise of one of the most delightful blocks in the city: 4th Avenue between Yew and Vine.

For years this hundred or so yards contained great music in the form of The Magic Flute - a store that was worth a visit for the magnificent pan-piper door-handles alone, Duthie's books, fine wines at the Kitsilano wine shop, good local food at Capers, and in the Coast Mountain adventure store, a reminder that this young, brazen city of Vancouver is only a very recent and temporary guest in some of the wildest, most majestic mountain and ocean landscape on earth.

Great music, great food, great wine, great books and great landscapes - the block once had everything necessary to feed the soul.

The Magic Flute was first to go - brilliant and dynamic local entrepreneur and owner David Lemon foresaw the collapse of the music business a few years before it happened and sold the shop. It limped on for a while but the CD business was being killed by the internet and soon music was gone.

Next out was great local food in the form of Capers. Yes, the store is still there - it's name is still on the awning but Texas-based Whole Foods bought it out and any recent shopper will see that the old, cosy store with its more cramped aisles and higgledy-piggledy lay-out has given way to a more spacious, generic supermarket-style design. Sometimes, when I am tired or distracted, I can mistake the displays for similar ones in Whole Foods on Kensington High Street back in London. So much for a neighborhood store.

The Coast Mountain store went next. You can stand right next to where it used to stand at the top of Yew and 4th and gaze out at the snow-capped summits and the Pacific Ocean but the store with its tents, sleeping bags, hiking boots, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that allows man to approach those mountains has gone.

And then, one of the saddest farewells of all, took place when Duthie's books closed in February of this year. From being a vibrant local chain to this one surviving store, Duthie's decline had been obvious. But I'd hoped against hope that they would survive. Books, we are being told on an almost daily basis, are going the way of the CD in this internet age. Duthie's held on until their knuckles were white. Then they fell and died.

Now the wine store remains but the rest of the block has gone from a nourishing place for the soul to purveying mass-produced clothes for our bodies and trinkets for our homes. Twas, perhaps, ever thus in Vancouver - the cult of the body takes precedence over the life of the mind. But for a few wonderful years, on a fine autumn day when the leaves on the trees that line 4th Avenue turned scarlet and the air took on that golden September tinge, you could walk just a few dozen yards and find the latest Douglas Coupland or the new Hilary Mantel, a fine bottle of Barolo or a home-baked raspberry and rhubarb tart, a tent to shelter you from the Pacific Northwest rains, boots to climb those snow-capped summits and some Beethoven to give you the courage and energy to set out. Everything in fact that a happy human being might want.

Douglas Coupland's Vancouver

Sailing past Canada House in Trafalgar Square, on the top of a double decker bus, I saw the banner draped across the building - Douglas Coupland. I knew that Coupland was a novelist but had no knowledge of his artistic activities. So I assumed that the Canadians had decided to fly Coupland in from his native Vancouver and just, well, have him hang out inside their splendid old colonial building. I debated going in and hanging out with him but the bus had sailed past, on its way to Piccadilly. And really, Coupland belongs in Vancouver.

Coupland belongs in West Vancouver to be precise. His seminal, "Generation X" may have taken place in the US but Coupland, who confesses these days to caring little for travel, is rooted in that bright, almost Californian, land of upmarket strip malls and luxury mansions on hills with stunning views that lies beyond the Lions Gate bridge - gazing sleepily across at downtown Vancouver.

Coupland's "jPod" had a recent outing as a series on Canadian tv. That story revolves around a group of video game programmers whose last names all begin with 'J'. They work in a 'pod' developing a game called 'BoardX'(and later 'Sprite Quest'). Coupland has been quoted as saying that the company they work for resembles but in no way is Electronic Arts - a video game company located in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.

But my favourite Coupland novel is "Eleanor Rigby". This one is a bit of a departure from his admittedly brilliant observations on our Google run planet. No other writer has understood and described our strange new cyber world better than Coupland. And with such rapidity. The man does not need to stand back and ponder a development. It happens and Coupland has it processed and ready to go.


"Eleanor Rigby" is the story of a very lonely woman,Liz Dunn, living in a dull little condo in, where else, West Van. Her life turns around when her deeply disturbed and terminally ill, illegitimate son who she had given up for adoption, returns to her life. For all his irony and detachment, Coupland has an almost naive sweetness in dealing with his character's emotional lives. Without saying too much, he gives his heroine a happy ending but not before leading his reader through one of the finest studies of modern loneliness that I've come across in a long time.