Jeff Samsonow

Empty Building | Apartment building without tenants is disappointing in Oliver.

Different. Pretentious. Beautiful. These are the adjectives that linger in my mind after wandering, with purpose, around the Oliver neighbourhood on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

The purpose was psychogeography, a closer look at the details of a neighbourhood, a walk set up as part of Doors Open Edmonton, a celebration of place, buildings, creativity, and identity. Doors Open is an international event focused on peering inside buildings not normally wide open to the public and exploring the hidden corners of a city.

Around Edmonton last weekend, a number of places of worship held tours, as did spots like the Alberta Legislature Building and the city archives. Walking tours were provided around the downtown, the Garneau area and the Francophone Quarter. While most of the events in Doors Open Edmonton are tours of buildings, this Derive (French for “drift” or “wander”) was about taking time to examine what’s really all around us.

Adam Waldron-Blain, my guide, admits the idea has an air of pretention about it. “The Situationists who came up with this, especially in its original incarnation — it’s not about taking random groups of people on tours,” he explains. “It’s about ‘I’m an artist so I’m going to drink a lot and wander randomly around the city and that is why I’m an important person.’”

As we set off from Jasper Avenue, I endeavour to remain open to whatever we find. We’re told to pay attention to what we see, hear (both near and far), and smell — the kinds of things we tend not to notice while moving from one place to another intent on work, home, meetings,
and parties.

Then, as if on cue, a pair of City Chase participants whip by us, very much ignoring the details, on the way to their destination.

Our group of five heads south and I’m hit by the image of bright red on green. It’s a homeless man, clad in red, sleeping hard next to a rundown church. This certainly isn’t a new image, but in this context — exploring the details of the city’s landscape to see how they reflect Edmonton and its residents — it’s a particularly striking one.

We pass LeMarchand Tower, a slick condo building standing tall over a classic piece of architecture and its namesake, LeMarchand Mansion. This might speak to where things have been and where they’re going. Build a new condo tower alongside a building once home to rental apartments and now filled with businesses.

Heading north of Jasper, I find a marble. Who the hell is carrying around marbles? Does anybody even play with marbles anymore? I haven’t seen a marble in 20 years and even then, it was just to throw at my sister. But it’s funny to think that someone in Edmonton has indeed lost at least one marble.
Then there’s the drunk guy with the vacuum (I’m going to assume he was drunk since he greeted us in a laneway with a loud voice and slurred speech.) He announces that the vacuum in his hand was “good ... but too loud.” He then promptly drops it beside his apartment building’s garbage bin and proceeds to loudly address the rest of our group.

I don’t think I would have bumped into him, especially not with vacuum in hand, had I just been walking through this neighbourhood on my way to work or the busy parking lots of Oliver Square. I would have been out on the sidewalk, and ignorant of all the action in the alley.

Next, we turn a corner into some green space. “Oh, a small park,” one of my companions says, with somewhat pleasant surprise in her voice. It is nice to see grass and the playground equipment, and to think there’s something to do over here besides live in your apartment and wait for the next workday.
In our hour or so of walking, we encounter not one but two abandoned apartment buildings. This strikes me as disappointing; in this relatively affordable neighbourhood, 50 or so homes could go a long way. One building is up for sale and I have to wonder what happened to all the people who once lived there. The second building is years older, with a “Mansions” moniker that makes me think of another mansion no longer a home.

Perhaps the oddest visual I’m left with after delving into psychogeography is the rainbow of colours garbage bins come in. I’m used to seeing the brown city bins in my own neighbourhood. There are plenty of those utilitarian-looking bins around, but also a few in hues of light, dark, and lime green, blue, red, yellow, and a rumoured aubergine.

Garbage bin colours don’t speak much about how we’ve built our city, nor to where we may be headed. But I still find it telling: if I haven’t noticed such a minor detail before, what else about this city have I failed to notice?