Skunks, squirrels and sarcasm have been employed in a battle to retain a small slice of green space in a park-deficient neighbourhood
There’s an old saying that you can’t fight city hall. But Dana Deschene is trying, and seems to be having a lot of fun doing it.
When the City of Vancouver announced in July that it wanted to put a temporary fire hall on green space at Union Street and Gore Avenue in Strathcona, Deschene was alarmed because she uses the area nearly every day as a park.
She put together a “three-pronged campaign” to protest the plan.
“The first step was to create these very sassy, sarcastic posters about why they should go ahead and do the project,” said Deschene.
She placed the posters at the site and on a telephone pole. One read: “Trees don’t pay rent, they drink all the water, and hog all the carbon dioxide!”
Another said: “We want more parking lots! — Joni Mitchell.”
“It was pretty spicy, and actually I got yelled at a couple of times by people who thought it was serious,” she said.
“One of the posters said: ‘Skunks Stink!! Screw ‘Em!’ And this one lady said: ‘How can you say that about skunks?’ I’m like, ‘Well, it’s clearly a joke.’ She said, ‘Well, I got really angry when I saw that.’ And I said, ‘Well, the point was to get your attention, so I guess it worked.’”
Step two was hosting a workshop for neighbourhood kids in the green space, where they made their own posters about why the city should keep it as green space.
“We installed our own big billboard next to the development permit sign and put the kids’ art up there,” she said. “That was there most of the summer. Every time it rained, I’d run out with a tarp and tarp the art.”
The third stage was giving the green space a name: People’s Park. Being a designer, she took it to a new level by creating a sign that looked exactly like an actual Vancouver park board sign.
“I borrowed a colour-matching tool to get the park sign right,” she said.
“Got the paint, painted it in my front yard. Had it assembled, then me and my girlfriend went out about midnight with a bottle of wine and installed it in the night.”
She was inspired by a similar sign that someone made for “Dude Chilling Park” in Mount Pleasant.
“People thought it was real,” she said. “It looked very legit, other than where the Vancouver park board logo would normally be, it was a photo of the fire hall annex with an X through it instead of the logo.”
The city eventually took down the faux park sign, as well as the billboard with the posters and children’s art.
“They brought in a (front end) loader to rip out our sign, which felt like overkill,” she said. “We used faux-cement footings. They were just cinderblocks.”
Her campaign seems to have helped to halt the development, at least temporarily.
“Given the feedback that the city has heard from residents and community groups, we have paused the rezoning process to re-evaluate location options,” according to an email from the city.
The temporary fire hall is meant to supplement a one at Main and Powell streets, which has been overwhelmed dealing with the fire and drug overdose crisis in the Downtown Eastside.
“The current Firehall 2 is the busiest fire hall in Vancouver and includes additional rescue units to support response in the Downtown Eastside,” the city said in an email.
“The building no longer meets the needs of the current resource and staffing levels. A temporary annex will relieve some of these pressures to ensure Vancouver Fire Rescue Services can effectively continue to provide critical emergency services in the community.”
Deschene thinks there are other sites that could be used for the temporary fire hall. On Monday night, she was among a group of Strathcona residents scheduled to attend a Vancouver park board meeting to “raise the issue of reclassifying and rezoning (the green space) as an actual park.”
The city said the site is currently zoned as a “a road right-of-way.” This dates back to 1968, when Vancouver was looking to build a freeway from the Trans-Canada Highway in Burnaby through East Vancouver, Strathcona, Chinatown and Gastown.
The freeway was nixed after massive public protest, but the land is still zoned as a road, even though it has never been one. Grass was planted and it became one of the few public green spaces in Strathcona and Chinatown.
