Hastings and Main: Tales from an Inner City Neighbourhood

Peter Martin is a senior projects editor at the University of Ottawa
Press.

Here’s oral history to rank with the work of Barry Broadfoot and Studs Terkell. The 20 people who tell their life stories are (or were; several are now deceased) residents of Vancouver’s “skid road” inner city and frequenters of the Carnegie Community Centre. All are elderly and all come across with an arresting degree of human dignity. Here are an ex-con, war veterans, native Canadians, a labour activist, an artist, a survivor of the Second Narrows Bridge disaster, a merchant seaman. Some of these people were Vancouver born and raised. More found their way to Hastings and Main from elsewhere. One of them says, “I like to be with people.” This book invites readers to “be with” 20 perfectly ordinary and quite extraordinary people. A celebration of the human spirit, flawlessly edited.