Jim Green’s gone to that big barstool in the sky. He has a smile on his face, wearing a porkpie hat, a glass of bourbon in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

The day Jim Green died, he broke a thousand hearts. Too sudden, too soon. He died peacefully in the Woodward’s building—a place that wouldn’t have existed without him.

A few days later, it was rainy and grey the morning he was cremated. The hearse moved at a walking pace along Fraser Street, slowing traffic to a snarl as it moved from the cemetery to the crematorium, a few blocks away. The rains came down and down and down. It sounded and felt like a whole city crying.

Best Mayor Vancouver never had. A civic saint. A streetfighter.

Last Sunday at the Cultch, where Jim received the Freedom of the City award, it was a legendary, unforgettable Vancouver day. Joey Shithead from DOA doing "Folsom Prison Blues", Bughouse Five, Charles Barber, Vanessa Richards, and the Woodward’s Community Choir—and many more. Tears of joy, laughter and inspiration. Everyone drinking through it. Jim talked about the need for civility, his love of Vancouver and being kind to each other. Toward the end of the evening, Jim sat on stage and looked at everybody in the audience. He was happy and at peace with himself and his life."

These are the moments life is made of.

For hundreds of people in this city, Jim brought joy, originality, urgency, curiosity, laughter and love to the city. He was a mountain of a man, a powerhouse that is irreplaceable in Vancouver—a city that he loved deeply with every fibre of his being.

He looked and dressed like a mob boss, but he was a gentleman and a scholar who had generous dollops of Southern charm to slather over anyone who was near him. He had quotes for the newspapers that sounded like lyrics from a Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen song.

Jim Green was a sociable socialist—he loved being around people. He swore like a sailor and owned the pool table in any bar he went to. He knew every server by their first name and they often kissed him on the cheek at the end of the night. He loved the Yale and used to be a regular at Rockabilly Night at the Railway Club years ago. He watched football every Sunday, but cried like a baby at the opera. He wanted Vancouver to be known as the "Caring Capital of Canada".

Jim Green was a mentor, a friend and a drinking buddy. I unofficially earned a master's degree in urban studies from the University of the Waldorf Pub in the late '90s, sitting next to him in the bar during the Saturday afternoon meat draws. He would talk for hours about a range of topics including Antonio Gramsci, urbanism, architecture, heritage buildings, the Canadian Seamen’s Union, his favourite flowers, how to properly roll a joint, community organizing in the '80s, and the May '68 riots in France. He loved talking about music. Jim was a vegetarian, but if he ever won the meat draw, he’d hold the winnings over his head and taunt the crowd, calling them "low-lifes" with an affectionate smile on his face.

Jim influenced hundreds of students through the generosity of his time and by living the idea that community knowledge is co-equal with, and often times more important than, academic knowledge. He helped graduate students with their research and taught them in Anthropology 303 at UBC—a course he co-taught with the late Michael Ames, the former director of the Museum of Anthropology. He taught his students to appreciate beauty and how to love cities. These students are now a new generation of professors, planners, government bureaucrats, health-care workers, senior policy analysts, NGO directors, and changemakers in the city. He influenced hundreds and hundreds of young people in Vancouver, who have only begun to make their contribution to the city. There’s a Jim Green Army out there, ready to fight the good fight.

Jim was a great intellectual, rooted in an oral tradition that has sadly gone out of fashion in contemporary times. He was widely read, had a storyteller’s cadence and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the city, which he shared with a comic’s timing. A bundle of contradictions—ambulance driver for a funeral home, longshoreman, cabbie, community organizer, radical government bureaucrat, academic, politician, consultant, urbanist, public intellectual.

Jim came to Canada to escape being drafted to Vietnam, driving through Montana toward Cardston, Alberta as a 25-year-old. Jim never stopped working after he arrived. He was still calling around town to find funding for cultural and community projects just a few weeks back. He loved Vancouver and Canada because of the divisive nature of the politics he was running away from.

Jim was adopted by the Haida Nation last year. Jim had to do a Haida Dance in public to get the honour. He was really honoured and genuinely touched to be invited. Fly up there some time—ask for a guy named Stinker. Everybody knows him. He’ll tell you all about Jim Green.

Jim was precocious, curious, childlike—he never grew old. At the tender age of 68, he was Vancouver’s oldest teenager.

Jim had a great sense of empathy towards his adversaries. He separated them out in to two types of people – "pigfuckers", and for the select few, the more derogatory "pigfuckers on parade". Jim was hilarious.

Jim was instrumental in developing projects as an organizer at DERA and also as a provincial government bureaucrat. He was involved in Tellier Towers, Pendera Place, Four Sisters Housing Co-op, the Lore Krill Housing Co-op on Cordova and East Georgia, Bruce Eriksen Place, and Solheim Place. The provincial government’s purchase of the Sunrise and Washington Hotel. The new Portland Hotel. The Sunrise Hotel and Strathcona nonprofit dental clinics. He championed dozens of art and cultural projects including Humanities 101 at UBC, the York Theatre, and an expansion of the Cultch. He had community operas at Four Corners bank and music in Blood Alley. He wanted the stretch of highway that heads into Cumberland to be called Ginger Goodwin Way, after the labour leader who was shot and killed by police in 1918. There were countless other projects that he had a hand in advancing. The list is longer than my arm.

At SFU’s new Woodward’s campus, he once again brought the opera to the community last spring as part of Introduction to Cultural Democracy, a free lecture series. He was crying during their rendition of Verdi’s "Va Pensiero" as Downtown Eastside residents from the Woodward’s community choir sang, while Charles Barber conducted. It was mesmerizingly beautiful.

During the graduation ceremony of students for Humanities 101 in the Main Library at UBC in December 1998, Jim cried through the whole thing.

As a city, when we can break down the contradictions of space, turn things on their head and imagine doing things a little differently, communities can develop against the traditional divides of the city. In such a polarized place, we always need new ways of working together. Jim was always at the forefront of that kind of risk-taking. Jim had a sensitive and restless artistic temperament, but he was always producing new work. He viewed the task of politics to be about changing the facts on the ground in the contemporary moment, irrespective of the political landscape which existed at a given time. It didn’t matter who was in power, provincially, civically or federally—for three decades, Jim Green was always changing the city for the better.

These were just a tiny sliver of his immense contributions to the city and the province.

I had an amazing, life-changing experience working for him for a couple years when I was young and fearless. In a way, for many of us, we haven't really stopped working for him.

The Scottish poem that Tommy Douglas used to paraphrase seems appropriate for a city still in mourning:

“I’le lay me down and bleed a-while, And then I’le rise and fight again”

You were a beautiful man who did beautiful things. You are still alive. There should be many things named after you. On behalf of Vancouver and for all the things left unsaid: Jim Green, we love you.

Am Johal is a Vancouver writer and was a good friend of Jim Green.