Summertime in Hastings
Don’t do (hard) drugs kids! That’s what I’ve learned from hanging around street corners in the Hastings area of Vancouver for a couple of days.
Hastings is located just outside downtown Vancouver, one of the oldest parts of the city and compared to other parts quite rich in north Americas short history. The local drug and homeless scene made this place their home, concentrating around East Hastings and Main Street. As a random tourist stumbling into this area, you will feel like you have been thrown into another world, especially confusing as it is very close to a few of the tourist hotspots, like Gas- and Chinatown, surrounded by normal neighborhoods.
In general the “Jays” as in junkies (referencing a local person who lived in Hastings for a while) are quite harmless. They are far too busy minding their own problems and don’t create any for unrelated people. Eeryone is in a pretty bad mood, stressed out, hastily walking and cursing at the same time. The occasional extremely happy person can be seen, you know they’ve just gotten on it. There are some parallels with consuming lighter drugs, the bad moods when not using are a thing here as well, just not as extreme.
One day I noticed a lot of the homeless enjoying ice cream and wondered where did all that free ice cream came from? About half an hour later the owner of the Vancity-store walked around asking for the person who broke into his storage and stole all the ice cream.
I visited Hastings a couple of times, every now and then I would take my camera and walk over, check the offerings on the market and hang around busy street corners to wait for something to happen. Standouts are public consumption of class A drugs in brought daylight, people don’t even go to the back alleys, stolen or “found” things being sold on the street market, the hilarious ice cream incident, people just sleeping on the floor and the different stages of the human decline over the time of their drug using careers. The lack of balls left me from shooting in the back alleys, this is where the real misery happens. Some of the people in the alleys move and even look like the zombies from the TV-series “the walking dead”. A very strange sight, especially in broad daylight.
I visited in the summertime, so life out in Hastings must’ve been quite relaxed without the burden of the cold weather. I can only imagine the additional stress and problems winter brings to the people living out in the streets of Hastings and Vancouver.
Patient 1000003186176, Hastings, Vancouver, Canada
This girl is a very good example to show that anyone can be affected by drug addiction and that once people go down this path it is hard to turn back. The girl reminds me of the legendary National Geographic cover girl “Afghan girl” or girl with green eyes (how I remembered it) Maybe she has got green ones too, she doesn’t give them away dozing off in the daytime. The 42 megapixels on my camera tell me that this girl is only 24 years old and on penicillin among some other info.
Tigers, Hastings, Vancouver, Canada
Loved the perspective on this one. Most people living on the street have all their belongings with them most of the time, so it is very common to see people digging through their bags to find whatever they think they need at the time. In this case the girl was looking for something to sell on the street market as she was just setting up her booth.
Marcus Gee from “The globe and mail” described it better:
“A young man sits on the wet sidewalk, his legs spread wide, sucking the smoke from a burning fragment of dope with a plastic tube. A man with lank black hair is slumped against a wall, bent over double like a limp marionette, his dangling arm twitching at his side. A woman in skinny jeans, leaning on a storefront, pulls the plunger of a syringe carefully up and down, getting ready to give herself a hit. An open package of dainty cookies lies by her side.
Canada’s opioids crisis has swept like a wildfire from the West Coast to the cities and towns of the East. But in the place where the match first dropped, the fire is still burning hard.
Scores are being killed by the poison in their drugs – their respiration slowing to a halt in an alleyway, a toilet stall or a lonely room. Eleven people died of overdoses in Vancouver in the space of just one awful week this past summer. On a single day, July 24, paramedics responded to 130 suspected-overdose calls. Of the nearly 8,000 such calls last year, about 5,000 were from the Downtown Eastside.
To get a sense for what the crisis looks like at ground zero, I spent a day there last week. This was a rough neighbourhood when I worked briefly at the local courthouse for a Vancouver newspaper in the 1970s, with alcoholics spilling out of the seedy bars, drug-dealing in the alleyways and hundreds of hard-up men living in flophouses. It is far, far worse now.
In the heart of one of the world’s most “livable” cities, just next to the boutiques and bistros of Gastown, shocking scenes of human degradation unfold every day. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it – not in Mumbai or Manila, not in inner-city Detroit or the South Side of Chicago.
On the morning that I arrived, throngs of weathered, wounded people were out on the rain-soaked sidewalks of East Hastings Street, the neighbourhood’s broad central avenue. Some sold pathetic trinkets on the sidewalk. Others huddled in doorways to stay dry. Still others pushed overflowing carts full of belongings. Many were taking their drugs openly on the street”
Misery, Hastings, Vancouver, Canada
This poor fellow, how does he even survive? Seemingly bound to a wheelchair, obviously homeless, an arm missing or not functioning, cuts and wounds all over his skin. This was the only person I handed a tooney after taking the photo.
The queen of everything, Hastings, Vancouver, Canada
Once she has made some money off selling some of the things in her stall she is most likely going to be just what what her shirt says… for a couple of minutes. Still, being the queen of everything is exhausting, especially collecting the supplies, so at the moment she is just sitting on the side of the road in her Hastings street market stall, half asleep from the tiring life in the hood.
Random street scene I, Hastings, Vancouver, Canada
Somehow the lighting doesn’t really fit the topic, dreamy summer vibes wouldn’t really be what I would be wishing for when shooting in Hastings, at least for authenticity. However, Vancouver’s summers seem to be long and hot, so there was no choice really. A guy on a skateboard, an owner less suitcase, a shopping cart with someones belongings and of course bikes. Bikes seem to be the junkies preferred way of transportation and a bit of a status symbol, like a fancy car.
Random street scene II, Hastings, Vancouver, Canada
Just a bunch of random people you will see crossing any of the streets around Hastings. Notice how personal maintenance doesn’t seem to be a thing and the guy in the back eating ice cream. It was hot that day and it was the day of the ice-cream-heist, but people consumed it more than anywhere else in the city, it must be some sort of aid or remedy for the withdrawals.
