The Concrete Charm of Joyce Station
It was a dull, overcast day when I decided to take the SkyTrain a few extra stops east to Joyce Station, in the East Vancouver neighbourhood of Collingwood.
I’m not sure what I expected, but I wasn’t entirely disappointed. I emerged from the station onto Joyce Street’s commercial strip, dominated almost entirely by Chinese and Filipino businesses. This part of Joyce, and indeed the whole area next to the SkyTrain tracks, is an odd mixture of low-slung postwar buildings and much newer condominium towers, built in the 1980s and 90s as part of a strategy to create high-density nodes around transit hubs. It still feels oddly suburban, despite the highrises, but there’s enough of a streetlife near the station to compensate for that.
The station, in fact, is pretty striking. It is beautiful in its functionality, a utilitarian structure that resembles nothing so much as an electrical substation. There’s something eminently appealing about this kind of simple, unassuming architecture, unafraid to serve as a backdrop to the posters, newspaper boxes and other bits of urban life that manifest themselves around train stations.
Looking east towards Burnaby, condo towers and offices follow the SkyTrain line
Chinese and Filipino businesses in a postwar commercial block on Joyce Street
Tags: Exploring the City, Vancouver
Lemuel says:
Hi I was wondering if I could use the first picture with all the newspaper stands in my site? I love it.
November 25th, 2011 at 3:37 am