The Mystery of 645 East Hastings
November 19th, 2007 by Kevan
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is home to an army of unsolved, unsolveable mysteries. I work there now, in the relative safety of a third-floor office building, and my daily transit commute is peppered by question marks from station to station. Each day I ride past the 8:00 am camp-out at the Bottle Depot, slide past the aimless congregation at Carnegie Community Centre, and step softly past the lonesome sleepers curled up in vestibules all across the city.
The mysteries of addiction and pain, buried inside people, are only explored through dialogue.
I don’t have time for that, I assure myself, fumbling with my security pass.
I’ll be late for work.
But work often lends itself to distraction, and this week I solved a mystery that has tugging at me since 2006. It’s the mystery of 645 East Hastings Street.
This building, nestled between a drycleaner’s and a clothing shop, is painted a reserved, uninviting gray. From the stucco to the security bars, the paint is like a blanket, covering even the windows. There is no signage — only a touch of graffiti — and the three black digits on the door, reading 645. It’s the cleanest building on this stretch of Hastings, but also the most austere.
645 E Hastings has a twin: a residential building covered by the same heavy coats of triple-thick concrete-milkshake paint. This twin is situated at 640 E Cordova. The narrow alley between Hastings and Cordova finds the rear ends of these two buildings situated diagonally across from each other, trying so hard to blend in.
Rarely does anybody enter or emerge from these twin buildings, save for the occasional vehicle being driven out of the heavily secured garage in the alley. The gray colour makes the buildings incredibly evasive – in fact, it’s such a subtle colour that the buildings are virtually invisible. I’ve often wondered why these buildings exist. What is their purpose? What function requires this much privacy, security and ambiguity? Is it a mob thing, a cult thing, a sex thing?
On Thursday, a lunchbreak stroll with a co-worker brought me through the alley where the mystery buildings connect. For the first time, the rear doors to 645 E Hastings were flung wide open. A young man was painting some very tall doors a very white colour. Inside, I saw white walls, white floors and a white ceiling. One or two workers moved about inside, amongst ladders, shelving and other unidentifiable gear in piles on the floor.
“He’s got an amazing studio space,” said my co-worker, shading his eyes to try and peer inside better.
“Wait, who does?” I asked. “It’s a studio? Whose studio? For what?”
“It’s Jeff Wall,” he said. “Jeff
Wall, famous photographer?”
Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall, I repeated to myself, preserving the name until a convenient Googling time arrived. The web search quickly turned into an all-out Internet-wide info-hunting expedition, and I soon learned that Jeff Wall’s technical proficiency, creativity and iconoclasm has been a driving force in the international photography scene for decades.