Pride, sacrifice, honour: the adjectives associated with monuments commemorating lives lost in conflict are endless.
Having travelled extensively through Europe, Tim Arden has seen those tributes first hand. For him, they’re poignant reminders of the Canada’s wartime contributions and provide a moment of pause.
While walking through downtown last week, Arden was appalled at the state of Victory Square. Photos he provided to the Courier show trash and graffiti strewn about everywhere.
“It’s just bloody awful,” he said. “I’m a lifelong Vancouverite and none of the other parks I go by look this bad.”
Arden works near Victory Square and has consistently passed by the park for decades. The pictures he provided to the Courier were taken around 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 14.
“As I’m walking by you see the nice blue sky in the background and your eyes are drawn immediately to the grass and it looks like someone has dumped garbage cans across the entire park,” he said. “There are people sleeping on the grass and on the benches. It looked disgusting and dirty and it didn’t look like a safe place to go to.”
Arden said he has no family or cultural ties to the military, and that litter on the scale of what he saw last week would offend him no matter what park it was in.
His frustration is rooted in wanting to maintain community pride, particularly in an area chosen to commemorate those who fought and died in the pursuit of freedom. Arden says he’s called the city to report the litter over the years, but has seen little in the way of tangible change.
“I have been in lots of places around the world where they have monuments to fallen Canadians and in all of those cemeteries there are lots of young kids from Vancouver who sacrificed their lives,” said Arden, 54. “The way those folks [in Europe] take care of our Canadian monuments, and I mean all of them, it makes you hugely thankful and respectful of them. It makes you appreciate your nationality that much more. We’re not just lucky to be here, people sacrificed to make this place the way it is today.”
Parks director Howard Normann conceded Tuesday that keeping the Downtown Eastside clean is abundantly more challenging than any other area in the city. He didn’t have any reports of special events or large gatherings in the area the night before to account for the volume of trash.
“We spend an inordinate amount of time on the Downtown Eastside parks versus a park on the West Side and that’s only because of the amount and frequency that we get the garbage there,” Normann said. “If a park in another part of town was receiving a frequent amount of garbage, debris and needles we would probably be there more often. But due to the nature of our business in the Downtown Eastside in those parks, we are there a lot of the time.”
Normann added that Victory Square is cleaned three times a week — on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — though park rangers patrol the vicinity on an almost daily basis. Should those rangers, or members of the public, see garbage accumulating additional clean-up resources are dispatched.
Sanitation and parks crews usually have Victory Square cleaned up by 9 a.m. on the allocated clean-up days, Normann said.
Residents are encouraged to call the city’s 3-1-1 phone service or use the VanConnect app to report incidents like the one Arden had seen.
“Don’t be shy — if people see something they feel is out of the norm, call us,” Norman said. “That’s what we do. We want to be there to help.”
@JohnKurucz
