architectural gonorrhea

The rain is moving across the city in plates. I am smoking a cigarette on the balcony, with the Trail of Dead cranked from the living room. The thunder is dull at first, and the city whoops back at it from the street. Lightning tests us. Everything is louder than it should be. My music is shredded into wisps ten feet out into the grey air.

There have been a lot of fires in Edmonton this summer. It was maybe almost two years ago now that the old Albert's restaurant on Whyte Avenue burned, and at the time it seemed so unreal, a giant error. Then in a month-long whoosh: The Aberdeen, Hub Cigar, and now the Garneau Mews. Everyone's musing aloud in public over what will be the next place to go. It seems increasingly unlikely that it will stop here.

We're all wondering. All these fires have been in the city centre. The air is charged with conspiracy. Edmonton, having just gotten its compulsive sprawl under control (or else it's finally spent, the boxes having surrounded us now, you can't leave the city in any direction without seeing them), is giving its core up to a lot of pink condominiums. Real estate prices are also on fire, and the pressure to convert is intense.

Just up the road from our apartment, there's a few pre-war vintage houses that the occupants are frantically trying to have declared historical sites. We have friends who live across from them in a row of houses that actually have protected status. When we went over there for dinner the other night, I saw "fire extinguisher" on the grocery list. Paranoia is escalating.

The city seems so fragile to me now. I remember, when I first had moved here to go to university, how the downtown was the skyline and the gnarled, confusing roads that twisted down the valley and either found a bridge or curled into moneyed residential areas of lush green and perfect driveways. It all seemed very imposing. Now that I live here and I see what is growing between the cracks of the towers, I'm really falling in love with the city.

Which is a shame, because with all of this development and all of these fires, this city is going to look like shit in ten years.

I feel like I've been robbed. I've lived here a dozen years, and I've only really started to find all the really good things about Edmonton. Now they're disappearing, or else they lie like tame dogs in the shadows of the ugliest fucking buildings you've ever seen.