Three bucks well spent

We found ourselves on the roof of a parking garage in downtown Vancouver, with the clock running. So we "wasted" 15 minutes ($3.00 the half-hour or portion), taking photos from that vantage point.

The garage is sandwiched between St. Paul's Hospital,

Comox Street side of St. Paul's.


Detail of facade.

and St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church,

Windows of St. Andrew's-Wesley's upper storey.

and sharing the building with the Century Plaza Hotel.

Back side of the hotel. Across the way, the Wall Centre.

The garage has only three storeys above ground, so from here, in every direction we are hemmed in by walls and staring windows.

A child's block structure, in boring grey.


A "window room", maybe a greenhouse, atop a plain brick structure.


Warm brick and dull windows.

And from the corner, we could look past the hotel, across Burrard, to a glass and steel jungle.

The Wall Centre: 48 storeys of blue glass. The low green glass roof below is the Provincial Courthouse.

And every window shows its own delirious vision of the city.

Identify these.


St. Andrew's-Wesley, Century Plaza, and (your guess here) reflected in the Wall.


St. Paul's, reflected in an unidentified building across Burrard.

We weren't alone on the roof; a crow brought down his lunch, intending to eat it in privacy.


He wasn't pleased to find us there; we were supposed to hurry into our car and go away. Roofs are for the birds! But we just kept wandering around, exclaiming and clicking. I walked over to the crow, and he moved to another wall, then to a light fixture,




then, when I was still following him, to the big communications dish,


where he bobbed up and down, cawing angrily. I tried to get a photo of this, so he stopped. (But Laurie, sneakily, got a shot from the far side of the roof.)

We outlasted him. There were still some buildings to photograph; we weren't going to leave until we'd got them all. Poor Mr. Crow gave up and went next door.

"People! They're everywhere these days! Meddling, nasty, noisy people! Can't a crow even eat his lunch in peace around here any more? Caw!"

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