A new 3-part blog series on The Little Mountain Project.
Part 3

Frankly, I wish there didn’t have to be a bad or an ugly. I would rather spend my time working on the feature documentary about Little Mountain.

The Ugly

There are small things that help us to honour the past, the Birks Clock for instance was saved, though the Birks Building was not. We call it “heritage”. We entrust the preservation of those few objects to the people who build our cities, and how they handle that heritage may reflect upon how they think about it.

Holborn’s Joo Kim Tiah and Donald Trump – we’re trusting them to build the new Vancouver

Two mid-century HERITAGE LAMP POSTS have laid undisturbed on a roadway close to the new building site at Little Mountain for past last three years.

Two mid-century heritage lamps at Little Mountain lay undisturbed for 3 years .

Little Mountain Policy statement – showing the street lamps as they once were.

The Planning Department chose one of the lamp posts for the title page of their Little Mountain Policy statement, because it said something about the history of the place – because it was a landmark.

The demolition company which laid most of Little Mountain Housing to waste was, inexplicably, responsible for the preservation of those two heritage lamp posts. One of the lamps was the focal point of a short film I made in a snowstorm in the winter of 2009. In the film the streetlamp flashed intermittently, resembled a lighthouse emitting a  distress signal, a warning of things to come…

And then last month, a construction company named URBAN ONE started work near that part of the site.  I had noticed that they were missing from the roadway.  I went to look for them, and found them in the grass nearby.

Wasted heritage at Little Mountain

Thinking about the details at Little Mountain.

Little Mountain: Detail of leaf-forms on capitals.

Perhaps it’s my fault.  I never lived at Little Mountain but after 5 years of filmmaking I’ve become attached to a few things.

So I’ve got some questions:

• What constitute civic heritage for you, at Little Mountain?
• How would you represent it in a civic art project?
• Would a poodle on a pole be good representation of the gentrification of the site?
• Send me your ideas and I’ll post them.

Respectfully yours,
David Vaisbord
The Little Mountain Project