A Venture to the Crossroads of Commercial Drive (in Opinion)

If you ever decide to walk the length -- and at least part of the breadth -- of Grandview-Woodland and you do it on a winter's day, then it pays to start out with a hearty breakfast. You can get one of those, billed as a ''meat skillet'' and served in the cast iron pan in which it is cooked, which seems both manly and befittingly industrial, arising at the corner of Powell and Commercial, where Kessel&March operates its foodstore/eatery.

Breakfast is served at the headwaters, so to speak, of Commercial Drive, the sinuous soul of Vancouver's east side and, it might be argued, one of the last hold-outs of class and conscience in a city gone mad with glass and nonsense.

Just a few short metres from my two baked eggs, ham, breakfast sausage, potatoes, baked beans, tomato, mushroom and toast is a chain link fence, several garbage cans, surveillance cameras and, on the other side of the fence, on the railway tracks, a rust-brown CN car bearing the emblem of La Commission Canadienne de Bl.

A river's job is to find its way to the sea. Commercial Drive, by contrast, flows up hill, away from the inlet to where the view is still grand but the land less wooded than when the railroad first made its way to Vancouver's shore. The port is all fenced off these days, and some of the near shore industry and chandlery has given way to huge storage lockers because apparently, in the modern economy, once we've offloaded all those goods that arrive from China in containers, our houses are no longer sufficient to accommodate the stuff we buy, so we pack it away back down near its port of entry. Self-storage is the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry. Strange times.

Opposite Kessel&March on Powell is the stirring of an even newer economy, Tesla's Vancouver service centre, itself just metres away from a Hydro substation that hums the tune of a post fossil-fuel world. I've never seen a Tesla actually driven up Commercial Drive, mind you. The east side still inclines more to fixing things than to flashing them about.

Up aways on the corner of Franklin, at Storm Brewing Ltd., brewmaster James Walton is ''renovating'' though it is hard to separate what's new from what's, well, chaotic. Anyway, when an epidemic finally hits our shores, be sure to have some Black Plague Stout on hand. It might not stave off Ebola, but at 8.5 per cent alcohol by volume, drink enough of it and you won't care. Across the street, meanwhile, Sincerity Wholesale Ltd. seems to promise more than it can possibly deliver.

The first major tributary to intersect with Commercial Drive is Hastings Street. Look right to get your first glimpse of distant downtown -- and a foretaste of the eastward creep of developers like Millennium (of Olympic Village fame), who are offering up 82 units in a four-storey condominium development, Bohme, and promising ''a wonderful new neighbourhood of white brick residences, shops and restaurants in the heart of authentic Vancouver.'' I suppose if your idea of bohemianism is to live in a white brick condo on Hastings Street on the site of a previously ''authentic'' car lot, then plunking down a quarter of a million clams on a 500-square-foot box in ''Vancouver's Trendy East Village'' might be just the ticket. Fill your boots, and feed your inner gypsy.

The corner of Commercial and Hastings is also where the proletariat chariot, the No. 20 Victoria bus, turns south and begins its climb past Nick's Spaghetti House, which has fattened many an east side family for nigh on 60 years. In the parking lot a binner gives a friendly wave, while a woman with bright green hair (a real bohemian, perchance?) who lives upstairs between the NGE Convenience Store's 7UP sign and that of a happily revived York Theatre opens the door to admit a friend. Kitty-corner is the Adanac Towers -- at 12 storeys, one of the tallest buildings in the precinct, a modernist concrete tower built in the late 1970s and a precursor, perhaps, to a flood of incoming density. At three or four times the height of most apartment blocks in the area, you would think it would offend the skyscape, but just like the 12-storey Panorama Gardens up on Frances Street, its injury is more in its drab design than its brawn. Adanac Towers looks down on a stream of cyclists hithering and thithering crosstown on one of the east side's most popular bike routes, and it's here that the first of The Drive's S-bends curls up to meet Venables Street.

Just before The Drive straightens out, in the space of half a block, you can get a tattoo, a haircut, your computer repaired, stock up on medical marijuana and -- ''vibes! lubes!'' -- tool up at Womyn's Ware to apply some rotation to your sugar plum. Just around the corner, the delightfully named S&M Auto will rotate your tires, but John Le Van's rubber is strictly for the road. Opposite is Astorino's, the Red Velvet Room and the Ace of Suedes, all due for the chop if developer Daniel Boffo can get his 15-storey mixed-use tower approved, which will rehouse rather than displace the Kettle Friendship Society. Those 15 stories haven't thrilled local heritage advocates, but a well-designed development might just give a welcome fillip to the bottom end of The Drive.

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A Venture to the Crossroads of Commercial Drive (in Opinion)