New Street Food Rules in Vancouver Emphasize Health and Diversity

Most city neighborhoods evolve organically over time, the slow accretion of buildings, shops, traditions and quirks.  Not Vancouver’s Olympic Village.  The ready-made ‘hood spanning eight city blocks was built practically overnight to house thousands of athletes for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.  After the competitors went home, it was transformed into the city’s newest residential district.   Though Olympic Village was slow to fill up, and remains a source of controversy in Vancouver, the neighborhood is beginning to come into its own.  I wrote about Vancouver’s newest destination in a recent article for The New York Times.

An Olympic Village in Vancouver is Reborn

By Remy Scalza; Special to The New York Times

DURING the Olympic Games in Vancouver last February, about 3,000 athletes and officials spent their downtime holed up in the Olympic Village. Filling eight city blocks, with 25 residential high-rises and mixed-use buildings, the $1.1 billion pop-up neighborhood was built on a desolate stretch of industrial land along the city’s waterfront. After the athletes left, the sprawling complex — nearly 1,100 units in total — was reinvented as Vancouver’s newest residential district. That transformation has, in turn, accelerated the emergence of the area around the complex as a destination unto itself.

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times website.

Vancouver, which is just across the border from Seattle, is hardly what most people think of Canada – It rarely snows in the city and during the summer beaches are packed.  But during winter, the mountains outside Vancouver get walloped with something like 30 feet of snow.  I spent a day last winter on one of those mountains learning to build that most cliched of all Canadian shelters – the igloo.  It was like making a snow fort as a kid but a lot more work.  I wrote about the experience for The Washington Post.

Learning to Build an Igloo in the Mountains outside Vancouver

Remy Scalza; Special to the Washington Post

Chilled from a day in the snow, stiff from hours of shoveling, we worm down the tunnel of the igloo one after the other. The wind’s howl mutes to a low hum. The day’s gray light goes black. I follow the pair of boots in front of me, crawling through cold, clammy air toward the glimmer of light ahead.

The boots belong to Michael Harding, igloo evangelist. An outdoor guide with baby-blue eyes and snow-white hair, Harding has raised untold hundreds of igloos in this corner of western Canada. “They’re warmer than tents. They’re soundproof. They’re practically cozy,” he’d explained that morning, as we climbed into the backcountry of the mountains outside Vancouver in his late-model Nissan Pathfinder. A friend and I have joined him and another guide for a one-day crash course in igloo basics. Not that I’m planning an assault on K2 anytime soon. But even for armchair adventurers, there’s just something about an igloo.

Our proving ground today is a plateau high atop Cypress Mountain, whose 4,700-foot peaks rise dizzyingly just beyond the city limits. Perhaps best known as the host to some 2010 Olympic ski events, Cypress is stubbornly wild. More than 30 feet of snow falls here in an average winter, and the endless, craggy backcountry provides a popular training ground for hard-core hikers gearing up for expeditions to Washington state’s Mount Baker, Alaska’s Mount McKinley and other high peaks of the North American West. Never mind the tots in ski boots in the parking lot and the legions of Lululemon-wearing hikers: Cypress still feels extreme.

To read the rest of the article on the Washington Post website, click here.

Photo: Stewart Butterfield

One little-known quirk about Vancouver is that it’s home to a small but thriving tech scene.  In fact, I was surprised to discover that the guy who invented Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, lives right across the street from me.  Unlike Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg, Stewart sold out years ago, netting a measly $35 million for Flickr.  But he’s hard at work on his latest project, an Internet-based game called Glitch.  I interviewed him for Vancouver’s leading business magazine, BC Business.

Stewart Butterfield, Philosopher Game King

By Remy Scalza

Stewart Butterfield takes play very seriously. Born in tiny Lund, B.C., and currently a resident of Yaletown, the former Cambridge philosophy student is best known for co-founding the photo-sharing website Flickr, which sold to Yahoo Inc. for an estimated $35 million in 2005. Now, pursuing a calling closer to his philosophical roots, the 37-year-old Butterfield is preparing to launch an Internet-based game called Glitch, which he believes will shake up online gaming much as Flickr did photo sharing.

“There aren’t any other big-budget, high-production-value, massively multiplayer games out there that aren’t about killing other people,” Butterfield says of Glitch, due to be released early this year. “Hopefully, people will just come and play.”

Click here to read the full article on the BC Business website.