Sept-Oct 2005

Author: Jane Mundy

Subject: Main Street main article

State of Main

Once a working class street on the wrong side of the tracks, Main has morphed into a vibrant, diverse community that remains true to its roots while sporting some hip new foliage.

by Jane Mundy

It’s a cross between Commercial Drive and Granville Street, and not just geographically. Not so funky as the Drive, not so gentrified as Granville, Main Street, as anyone who lives and works there will tell you, has its own identity and is definitely the trendy new spot on the Vancouver map. In the past decade, it has developed into a mecca for foodies, with Aurora Bistro at the helm on 7th to the Reef dropping anchor around 28th, and a whole lot in between, including the masthead Sun Sui Wah.

Although Main Street is a main artery of Vancouver and stretches eight kilometres, the best food and retail establishments (not including the Punjabi Market around 41st or Del-Hi-Darbar at 5th) start with The Foundation at 7th and continue to Duffin’s Donuts at 33rd. If you’ve got a hunger for cheap eats, there are numerous options. If you’re stepping out, celebrating a special occasion or bringing out-of-town guests, look no further. However, be warned: there are still some sketchy places wedged in with the good. Don’t succumb to the first wafts of eau de greasy spoon—do a bit of homework first.

Main has seen scruffier days. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the sex trade thrived on some of its side streets. It used to be Mean Street, with a few crack joints at one end tapering to fast food and takeout greasy spoons. And not too long ago, Peter Vaisbord, BIA (Business Improvement Area) coordinator with City Hall, went to the Western Front theatre to watch a performance and discovered there was nowhere to go for a decent coffee. Dara Steadman at Monsoon remembers a thriving crack cocaine business in his neighbourhood at Broadway and Main. “In 1998, nobody came here," says Steadman. “Now it has a nice feel, with small businesses moving in, and no chains.” Well, there are a few, but the Golden Arches on 30th recently fell, and there is now only one Starbucks, with a few other minor chains tucked away in a mini mall. Other than that, the street comprises mainly independent businesses.

Of course, it takes people to change a street. The area’s demographic has morphed from blue collar workers in the 1950s and ’60s to a thriving community of young, urban professionals who can’t afford to buy on the westside but find Mount Pleasant and Riley Park (between 7th and 30th) still market-friendly. Many of them are buying into “Loftland,” around 7th and Main. Peter Vaisbord explains that “commercial areas lag from residential by five to 10 years. If the area is rundown, residents will have to go to other areas, but eventually business will respond to the neighbourhood . . .” In some cases, he says, an area gets to be known city-wide and becomes a destination.

That happened to Fourth Avenue in the 1960s and ’70s. It was a low-rent hippie neighbourhood, and from it sprang hippie culture. Now there’s an evolution on Commercial Drive. Thriving and vibrant, it has even become a tourist destination. Vaisbord believes that Main Street is next. “The emergence of Main will have a character in its own right: hip, edgy. But it’s not so evident if you drive at 50 kilometres an hour. Get out of your car and stroll down the street—there’s an incredible explosion of shops,” he says.

Start your stroll around 7th in the Mount Pleasant area and plan on spending a few hours. This is the first area where there was a conscious effort to revitalize the streets with historic storefronts, and the public has rebranded this area as SoMa —south of Main. There are three separate yet similar areas on Main Street that stretch from 7th to 33rd. They each tend to have their own specialty but “all are in the SoMa spirit,” says Vaisbord.

Next comes the area between 16th and 33rd that is generally known as mid-Main,

which is evolving into a hip, young and almost underground fashion district. Vaisbord likens this area to New York’s Noho district, north of Soho. Good analogy: just drop into Narcissist, Eugene Choo or Barefoot Contessa and you’ll see what he means. And it also contains the Flower Factory, the best florist in Vancouver.

The third area between 25th and 30th still has lots of antique shops but is becoming more “neighbourhood serving” with hip eateries such as Locus and The Reef. Several restaurants, such as The Main and Montmartre, feature live music, and the neighbourhood is fast emerging as an entertainment area, along with trendy shops such as My Orange Bag and Bodacious.

And then there are the stalwarts. Although Frank Cipriano has seen a helluvalot of changes since opening Cipriano’s in 1985, he still loves it here. Back then there was only a handful of Chinese restaurants and Antique Row. “A lot of my friends thought I was nuts when I came here,” says Cipriano. His pizza and spaghetti house fast became a booze-can, thanks to the spillover from the Legion a few doors away. “They would come down to my place and drink like mad. Once the westside customers came, I had to become a legit place, I had to bar almost 40 of [the Legionnaires]". Now he has celebs—Murray Goldman and Jimmy Pattision, Tom Jones and k.d. lang—dropping by. “Originally I was gonna do just pick up and delivery, thinking, ‘Who the hell is going to come here?’ Amazing how things change,” he says.

Bill Ible has been a butcher at Windsor Packing Co. for 17 years. He has noticed a change in clientele from older folks and ethnic groups with large families to young people with one or two kids. “Change is always good, but people buy differently,” he says. “They used to buy sides of beef to stock up the freezer, ground beef, sausages and stewing cuts. Now there’s more day-to-day shopping with quicker, easier to prepare items such as steaks, chops and pre-marinated kebobs, lamb chops, marinated wild salmon.” They also have customers regularly picking up cooked and barbecued chicken and chicken cordon bleu — “just pop it into the oven.” Although Andrew McIvor has been working at Windsor Meats for only three years, he finds Main Street a “livelier place, diverse and trendy… when I go for my walk at lunch, I can just go up the street for Vietnamese soup, a Jewish bakery, Halal market, Italian deli . . .

“There’s tons of stuff, there’s a real mix among the people here, everyone gets along and it’s pleasant, a real community. People here are trendy, as cool as the butchers,” he says, laughing.

Ible agrees. “We still have a real mix. One of the nice things about Main Street is the diversity. We used to have a lot of Portuguese, Germans, every major European country. Now we have the world.”

Not only is there a great variety of places to choose from, independent business owners and the people who work here are fascinating and friendly. They have a sense of community. They believe they are in the right place at the right time. And they support each other; there’s a lively, healthy sense of competition. As Simon Cotton of the Reef says, “I’d like to see a culinary experience on Main Street,” and business owners are working together to realize this concept.

Jeffrey Van Geest at Aurora Bistro came to shop for clothes on Main Street about five years ago. “We liked the community feel and the independent shop owners,” he says. “It’s a place where almost every shop is maintained by individuals and growing … we want the future of this neighbourhood to associate with us.” Even though Van Geest is a relative newcomer, he has seen the street change: Crime cleaned up, people fixing old homes, “kind of a gentrification … We plan on being here a long time, and I would love to stay in the neighbourhood.”

The Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver, just a few blocks from Aurora, seamlessly fits into the new culinary scene. Chef and co-owner Tony Minichiello thinks he lucked out with this location: he refers to Main Street as “fantastic, eclectic.” His international students love it here. “It’s a good vibe, and it feels safer than when we first opened 16 months ago,” he says. The area is changing that fast. “You can tell by the passersby . . . people are in their late 20s, and much more cosmopolitan. Business has been great and the location has a lot to do with it,” says Minichiello.

Jeff Van Geest dropped by shortly after the school opened and chatted with owners Tony and Chris. “They seemed to be coming from the right place. They had a connection, a really passionate and were in touch with where the industry is at,” says Van Geest. He did some demos at the school, then hired a couple of students as line cooks. Other restaurants in the area have done the same, such as Locus, the Foundation and the Whip. “I’m always impressed with what the students are putting out, and I can stand behind that school,” says Van Geest.

To gaze into the future of Main Street, one has only to look at some of the street’s present building projects and those that are on the drawing board. A do-it-yourself car wash is getting demolished and a neighbourhood house is taking its place. The corner of 12th and Main will see “mixed use”: retail ground floor and residential above. Rezoning in the Hub building next to Monsoon and further up the street at the former McDonald’s site will bring more shoppers to the area. The downside: rents will rise. For the consumer, the future is looking good. Main Street finally has its own cold beer and wine store, featuring primarily B.C. products.

Brewery Creek Beer and Wine Store derived its name from a creek that ran through Mount Pleasant to False Creek; portions of the creek still run under city streets today. Eleven wooden bridges crossed Brewery Creek back in 1897, with as many as 16 breweries in its heyday. Owners Fred Wilson and Gary Reilly have designed the building with the area’s history in mind, including beautiful old oak doors with brass fixtures, a brick red exterior and a collection of memorabilia inside.

Wendy Nicolay and Nigel Pike, former owners of Tangerine on Yew Street, are the newbies to Main Street. They will soon open Habit (the former Typhoon location) along with partners David Nicolay and Rob Edmonds from the design company Evoke. David Nicolay has lived around 5th and Main for 10 years and found it under-serviced; although there was good, nutritional, ethnic food to be had, there was nowhere to simply have a beer or light dinner. “We’ve been looking, and in the past few years we were fortunate enough to find a space,” he says. They are still working on the design but want to be accessible to a wide group of people.

“Many of our clients are high-end Yaletown, and we decided that is not the clientele in the Main Street area,” says David Nicolay. He notices that this area is more relaxed than Yaletown, but people go out more regularly. “In Kits, people go out religiously for brunch, but here there’s more of a social dynamic going on, people go out every night . . . Places like the Foundation have line-ups every night, even in the pouring rain,” he says. Part of the attraction is price, but “they really hit the mark for what people wanted.”

A few blocks south, Matt Thompson at The Five Point says, “There’s a lot of room for everyone and we are looking forward to change . . . On Main Street, you are welcome as a newcomer, people aren’t competitive here—it’s a cool place.” Yet another thing that makes Main Street unique.

David Ramslie of City Hall’s planning department is working on the Main Street Showcase Project. “Now the street will start to match the stores,” he says, especially from 16th to King Edward. City Hall’s vision is to have a street with wider sidewalks in Mount Pleasant (7th to 16th) and the Punjabi Market, and in a few mini-plazas in the Riley Park area (16th up to 41st). In addition, there will be new street trees and public street art, from art in the sidewalk to art mounted in poles, as well as freestanding sculpture.

“Main Street is an old trolley route, a historic street, so we will try to use granite tree surrounds and other materials and techniques to pay homage to its roots,” Ramslie says.

But every street goes through its evolution. “We have a market economy and it’s inevitable at some point that some chain stores will move in,” Ramslie predicts. But good, solid establishments such as Sun Sui Wah and Aurora Bistro mixed with the old guard such as Cipriano’s and Windsor Meats, combined with new businesses such as Habit and Brewery Creek Wine and Beer Store, will keep regulars coming back and will foster new clientele.

To really appreciate this fascinating part of Vancouver, take a leisurely stroll, shop a little and bring along an appetite.

Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver: 2725 Main St., 604-876-7653

www.nwcav.com

Brewery Creek Beer and Wine Store: 3045 Main St., 604-872-3373