Ah, Glover
Park. In the 90s it was a seedy place, dark and leafy, where you might get a
fright walking through. Strolling along, you would look up to find you were surrounded by silent
drinkers; half-hidden in the nooks and crannies, screened by big old trees, low
walls and shrubbery.
All the
familiar faces would be in there at some point – the people you didn’t know,
but saw nearly every day. They were always around, wandering aimlessly through the streets or sleeping on
benches in Cuba Street, drinking in the bus stops at the top of Courtenay Place
on a rainy day. The little crumpled lady with the Egyptian eyeliner, Happy
Santa, the impossibly skinny, white-haired man in the gabardine raincoat and
the wild eyed beardy man who shouted all the time. And dozens more, all part of the fabric of
the city.
Then in 2006 the
park got a facelift. Now it’s a breezy, urbane greenspace, open and airy, with
a clear view from edge to edge.
There are no signs that say “No Rough Sleeping”, “No
Homeless”, “No Drinking”.
But without the shelter of the natural alcoves, arranged around the old rambling
central path, there are no longer any private, semi-enclosed spaces. Now a
wide, straight path cuts right through the centre, and the entire site is open
to the sky.
New businesses had crept in: a designer fabric shop
here, an upmarket French Café there. More and more pressure was put on the
Council to do something about the park’s residents. No place in hipsterville
for hoicking, swearing, old-school drunks in sleeping bags. So, first a remodel
of ‘Alky Park’ to make it less fit for purpose for rough sleepers, and two
years later a new bylaw: the Central City Liquor Ban.
Fittingly though, alcohol is still a feature at Glover
Park. These days a bar, ‘The Rogue and Vagabond’ sits at its edge, and a corner
of the park beside it is roped off on sunny days for the private use of its
customers, who can take their ease on
beanbags on the grass. It could be that
when alcohol is a commercial transaction, licensed and regulated, it is less
likely to cause a nuisance than when it’s guzzled secretively from a bottle in
a brown paper bag, on a dark park bench. Or it could be that the Central City Liquor Ban was not designed to control drinking in the area so much as to penalise and exclude an already marginalised section of society, a community of rough sleepers who
had no voice, no place to go, and very little economic power.
Craft beer, anyone?
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| Photo credit: Dreamstime |
Craft beer, anyone?
Excellent writing, Liz. Great to see you're continuing with the blog, and I'll look forward to reading more. That's a great title for this post, too — I can't quite put my finger on what it is that works so well, but it has the quality of poetry.
ReplyDeleteThanks Pete. It's from a Denis Glover poem (I've always thought this park was named for him, and only just found out I'm wrong). But, never let the truth get in the way of a good title.
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