As a youth, I loved the Saturday morning shopping excursions with my mother, when we headed straight for Woodward’s Department store and Gastown. This was the shopping hub of Vancouver, before the Eaton Centre development, which changed the dynamics of the city forever. Today, Gastown is a popular, historic and tourist destination.
A small, old plague is found there amongst the studios and offices, which informs us “you are here,” with the symbolic red dot, reminiscent of almost every super mall map in North America. The Mews, also known as Gaoler’s Mews, is a small, intimate, inner courtyard, built in the mid 1800s, which once served as the city’s first jail.