192nd DTES Street Market at Pigeon Park in Vancouver Downtown Eastside (DTES) on Sun Feb 9, 2014

February 10, 2014 ahamedia Leave a comment Go to comments

192nd DTES Street Market and 6th Street Market of 2014

Roland Clarke, Coordinator of the DTES Street Market says:

This was the 192nd market at Pigeon Park on Sunday. We are always proud of this number because it represents the DTES Street Market as one of the longest running events in DTES history.

We had two porta potties this weekend!

Thank you, City of Vancouver!

By the end of the day, the first one was completely full and clogged like normal, but the second one was still usable. Progress!

It was again great weather for Vancouver in the winter. Cloudy, cold, but no rain.

We had no major incidents throughout the day, and most of the volunteers showed up as they promised.

The police interaction during the day was very positive. We had a visit from Mark Bradshaw, who was friendly and cracked some jokes as usual.

Later in the day, we asked two officers to help with the erratic couple that we frequently have problems with. The woman that likes smoking meth openly in the market fired one up in front of everyone. The volunteers tried to get her to be respectful of the families and children that may be walking by, but she just denied it and argued with the volunteers. The police were flagged down and helped us move them out of the market. The police were helpful and just stood around while the couple packed up, and therefore assisted the volunteers immensely. The couple were told that they could come back to the market next week, but had to leave today. They left peacefully. Hopefully this is a new era of cooperation between the VPD and the DTES Street Market!

We also had a celebrity visit from MaryClare Zak from the City of Vancouver. She wandered around the market and spoke to a few of our volunteers. She had nice things to say, and I hope that it showed how proud the volunteers were of their work.

DJ did outreach for the DNC at the market, and polled a number of vendors on their opinions of the DTES LAP process. She will present these findings at our next board meeting.

We had good sales again. Sold out of Coffee and Hot Chocolate at about 1:30pm.