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A particular melancholy attaches to a construction site where work has come to an enforced halt. Something's gone awry. Regulations were breached, financing imploded, partnerships came unhinged…what was conspicuously and optimistically begun has become a testament to the fragility of human enterprise. Ozymandias, but with girders.

For the longest time along East Pender Street, there was a sunken garden of rusting beams and rebar. Also on view were the colourful tags left by agile graffitists and a homespun sign, very large. Its angry sentences told a half-coherent tale of betrayal, connivance, foreclosure. Time was that I would pass this pit several times a week. I became perversely fond of its brute ugliness, and the evidence of choleric spunk. I was sad when the sign disappeared, and unsettled when I learned that the property had been purchased by Bob Rennie, our city's King Condo. It seemed a sure and certain sign that the changes so long in the wind for Chinatown were on the cusp of being made manifest; that the so-called Vancouver Miracle-phalanxes of glassy towers rising up from townhouses from which no one seems ever to emerge-was about to spill over from the amply colonized downtown.

Don't misunderstand. I have nothing against Mr. Rennie, whose success is conspicuous and, I daresay, well earned. Nor do I have anything against development or gentrification, per se. How could I? A few years ago I did as many of my kind have done. I bought a tumbledown house in Strathcona-a few blocks east of East, as the new Rennie project has been named-propped it up, and made it a monument to the twee-er aspirations of the white middle class. Heritage colours! Radiant heat! Top-of-the-line appliances! When it comes to the cluttered business of neighbourhood gussying-the depletion of cheap rental stock, the displacement of residents, the imposition of an aesthetic and therefore of a value-I'm not in a position to holler "J'accuse!" from the moral high ground. That said, I still feel the stirrings of a future nostalgie de la boue when I observe the forces of homogeneity massing on the Chinatown frontier. I worry for the future of its charms: the waft of dried fish and ripe durian; the uneasy mix of commerce and grunge; the way it is absolutely of this place and absolutely not: an old and established neighbourhood that remains a gathering ground for some of the city's most recent arrivals. Whenever I walk or shop in Chinatown-an ethnically limiting name for so pan-Asian a place-I still have the odd and salutary experience of sensing what it is to be foreign. Granite countertops and $200 a square foot: these things are bone-bred. The burning of hell notes and the thwhack of mahjong tiles: these live in a place removed from native understanding. I appreciate the obliquity. Selfishly, I'd like to hang on to it.

These are Vancouver's oldest neighbourhoods. Strathcona has, by and large, developed gracefully, through reclamation. Chinatown, a vastly more commercial precinct, will feel the exertion of different, stronger pressures. Strathcona, of course, was named for the Scottish industrialist and railway magnate, and while I was hunting down the idiosyncratic catalogue that follows, I crossed paths with an elderly Chinese man. He was walking briskly, all the while singing, in what I took to be Cantonese, "Auld Lang Syne": a weirdly apropos collision of culture and sentiment that seemed somehow, eloquently, to say it all.

Best Haircut Under $10

New Gore Barbershop
243 Union Street
604-683-5882

Only $7.50 will get you a bob at the evocatively named New Gore Barbershop. At this price, it's optimistic to think in such qualitative terms as "best", or even "decent". However, the quantitative certainty is that your hair will be, at the very least, shorter.

Best Place of Quiet Contemplation: Indoors

St. James Anglican Church
303 East Cordova Street
604-685-2532

Strictly speaking, this is a Downtown Eastside location, but as it's a spiritual centre for many Strathcona and Chinatown residents I include it here. Marvellously proportioned, lofty yet contained, beautiful in its austerity and symmetry, and redolent with years of incense, this is one of the city's great interiors: a place steeped in a peace so palpable and embracing that it transcends faith tradition.

Best Place for Quiet Contemplation: Outdoors

Strathcona Community Gardens
700-block Prior Street

Once a landfill, these small and varied plots, lush and productive, are a miracle of salvage. Everywhere is the evidence of industry, but quietude reigns. Find a bench or other perch. Sit. Listen to the garish treble of the birds and the subtle, necessary bass continuo of rot.

Best place to Witness Civil Disobedience in Action

On the western edge of the MacLean Park housing project, on the east side of Gore Street, between Union and East Georgia, is a wedge-shaped park, always festooned with litter. In plain view are signs that forbid the feeding of pigeons, gulls, geese. And every day, several times a day, people gather with bags of crumbs or, remarkably, great messy strands of tripe, and, in the shadow of these signs, feed the pigeons, gulls, and geese. One is well advised to brush up on the spelling of psittacosis.

Best place to be reminded of the tyrannical nature of gravity

The Venus Theatre
720 Main Street
604-685-3344

The Venus is one of the city's last porn palaces. In the lobby, visible from the street and enjoyable without penetration, is a hand- lettered sign which reads: "To protect yourself from falling down at the stairs in darkness, we kindly suggest that seniors, disabled persons, and drunks don't watch movies at the balcony upstairs." The courtesy! The inclusivity! It's almost enough to make one buy a ticket and test the stickiness of the seats. Not quite. But almost.

Best place to be reminded that the tyrant gravity can be temporarily held at bay

A cheerful neon sign in the window of the Chinatown Plaza at 180 Keefer Street suggests, "Learn to Fly. Enquire at Fairyland."

Best place to mourn the passing of an institution

The Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurant
137 East Pender Street
604-683-8816

Late this past spring, there was a fire at 137 East Pender. The Buddhist Vegetarian Restaurant, on the main floor, posted a sign regretting its forced closure and promising that it would reopen soon. It never did. Now, a new sign advises that the owner has retired, and that another restaurant will soon open in its stead. The chefs will remain, as will a few signature dishes, and it might be fine-but it won't be the same. I squinted in recently and was dismayed to see that the interior, with its cheerful booths, is being done up. And will they still let you bring your bike inside? Time, as ever, will tell.

Best Place to Challenge the Adequacy of a Drinking Straw

New Town Bakery
158 East Pender Street
604-689-7835

Directly opposite is the New Town Bakery, famous for its steamed buns. I find them to be intestine stoppers, but the halo-halo is to die for. This is a Filipino concoction, a sundae made with vanilla ice cream, chipped ice, sweet red beans, jackfruit, pineapple, and shredded coconut (or macapuno). I like to try, with slurping abandon, to force the corporal bits up through the straw, all the while imagining I'm dragging a lake for a body. Aren't you glad I never married your daughter?

Best Garden

Chinatown and Strathcona are rich in gardens. They include public showpieces, such as the already mentioned Strathcona Community Gardens, and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. Many private gardens are also easy to view, such as those kept by the owners of the townhouses in the 700 block of Hawks Avenue, or the amazing cultivated wildness that spills onto the boulevard at East Georgia and Princess. But my favourite, from this past summer in any case, was to be found at the MacLean Park housing project: a mishmash of lobelia, marigolds, parsley, and so on, planted in a concrete container. It was the work of children; members, I suspect, of a youth group. The young gardeners had inscribed their names in chalk on the wall abutting the container. They were Maggie, Andrea, Miranda, Amanda, Dale (whose name was later crossed out, you can just imagine the tiff that led to that), and Portia. "And Portia's family," said a chalk addendum. Writ large above the names, with a heart dotting the "i", was the plea: Do Not Ruin Please! Which is a wish for closing, and a wish I'd echo with the whole of the neighbourhood in mind.