Downtown hit by a barrage of tagging
`This social disorder seems to be taking over the neighbourhood,' says business leader
Pigeon Park Savings used to inject some much-needed beauty into the troubled Downtown Eastside in Vancouver.
Since 2017 the building at Columbia and Hastings streets has been covered with a mural featuring giant pigeons painted in a Haida style, set against a black backdrop. The work by First Nations artist Corey Bulpitt was striking, elegant and beautiful, a stark contrast to the visual chaos surrounding it.
No more. During the COVID -19 pandemic, the DTES and the city's Chinatown area have been hit with wave-after-wave of graffiti and tagging. And now Bulpitt's mural is quickly being covered.
At the rear, one of the pigeons is being swallowed up by a jumble of giant silver letters reading “SETAL.” In turn the SETAL graffiti has been tagged by “MADDY,” “KOPU,” “PMO” and “IO”, with an X through O. Atop SETAL are several more tags — the only intelligible one reads “KMFD.”
That's just the back. There are probably dozens of tags on the building, which will soon be demolished for a new social-housing project.
Columbia and Hastings has become the epicentre of graffiti in the Downtown Eastside. The east wall of the four-storey-high Shaldon Hotel is literally covered in graffiti art sponsored by the Overdose
Prevention Society (OPS), which operates out of tents in an empty lot next door.
Some of the graffiti on the Shaldon is quite striking — it's art, not mere tagging. Graffiti art has also spilled into the neighbouring lane and across the street onto historic McDonough Hall, Vancouver's oldest wooden commercial building.
But there's so much of it, the whole corner feels overwhelming, kind of post-apocalyptic. And that's the best of it — the graffiti in Chinatown isn't anywhere as good.
The 1911 Sun-Ah Hotel is a handsome, five-storey brick building listed on the Canada's Historic Places website. But that hasn't stopped several graffiti artists from defacing the bottom with messy lettering. Somebody named “COZE” even climbed up to the roof to leave their tag.
“It's horrible,” said Jordan Eng of the Chinatown Business Improvement Association.
“We're spending a ton of money on it (cleaning the graffiti). There's no enforcement, there's no responsibility for the people that are doing it. Businesses are suffering as it is (from COVID -19), let alone having this social disorder that seems to be taking over the neighbourhood or the community.”
The most prolific tagger seems to be “Kristy,” who has been leaving her mark all over East Pender Street.
As it happened, new business owners Bradley Spence and Lukas Tanasiuk were cleaning one of her tags off their store as a reporter walked by.
“We're opening up in a monthand-a-half and trying to keep our storefront clean with the vinyl we just put up,” said Spence. “(But) it got defaced pretty much a week after we put it up.”
Eng said the city's COVID-19 response team has “doubled our budget” for graffiti removal, but businesses can't keep up.
“You clean it one day and the next day it's tagged again,” he said. “It's that frequent, in terms of what these taggers are doing. I think from a policing point of view, they know who some of these people are. But it's a low priority on the policing side. They're dealing with the guys with the knives and weapons in the area.”
Sarah Blyth of the Overdose Prevention Society said the increase in tagging is probably due to the pandemic.
“From my perspective it's just been a chaotic year in general,” said Blyth. “So chaos breeds chaos.”