Main St.
In the long ago, this place was a thin arm of land that reached out and almost grasped the hand of the arm on the other side of the water; together, they almost formed a land bridge across the waters of the estuary.
These arms of land seemed, to the settlers, to be the obvious spot to put a bridge so that people, livestock and wagons of goods could travel more directly from the relative hinterlands of Mount Pleasant, with its dairy farms, vegetable gardens, orchards and breweries; to the relatively dense populations in the areas we now call Strathcona and the Downtown East Side, near the mills and slaughterhouses.
Swing north around the Midas Brake and Muffler parking lot to Industrial Avenue, and then head north again on Western Street. There are several interesting murals in this area now, thanks to the Main Street Mural Festival
Once people start questioning their assumptions in one part, they’d start questioning in other places… like, this was all mud flats, and this ravine was here but this one wasn’t. Seeing the layers, that’s something they’ll take; that [the city is] a big intertwined system of beings and mass, not just people and buildings and businesses.
Nicola Hodges, Artist