The Village on False Creek condos - Millennium Water - is a jumble of elegant towers of bent steel and aquamarine glass, brick and block, clustered around a central square.
Recession-slowed sales have left some blocks of Olympic Village still partly deserted, so the cultural and culinary pulse of the new neighborhood is best felt along its fringes.
A gritty warren of dive bars and chop shops bumps up against experimental galleries and health-conscious dining spots. On bike paths along what was once toxic marsh, mothers in yoga wear trot behind sporty strollers, and couples pose for photographs against the downtown Vancouver skyline.
"There's a shockingly large number of galleries around here, all hidden among these old industrial buildings," said Jude Kusnierz, who runs The Beaumont (316 West Fifth Avenue; 604-733-3783; thebeaumontstudios.com), a 7,000-square-foot, two-story hive of studios in a former denture manufacturing plant. Inside the collective, works for sale clutter walls while artists — including several painters, a composer and two fashion designers — hunch over drafting tables, mixing boards and canvasses.
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Vancouver's health fixation, in combination with the neighborhood's bohemian disposition, have given rise to a nexus of organic and vegan restaurants, including a raw food specialist, OrganicLives (1829 Quebec Street; 778-588-7777; organiclives.org), which opened last year. "People get physically angry — hands flying, arms waving — when we don't have these macaroons," said the manager, Faye Caudwell, of the spot's most popular dessert item.
Village on False Creek condos
Also on offer are lasagna and curry (both uncooked, of course), as well as smithies and other vegan sweets.
Fully cooked fare is served a few blocks south at eight ½ (151 East Eighth Avenue; 604-568-2703; eightandahalf.ca), a new restaurant housed in a 1910 home mercifully overlooked by the wrecking ball. Inside the snug, one-room space, the area's creative class dines on a rigorously local menu of fresh fish, organic beef and produce cooked with an elegant, slow-food aesthetic.
"It's the mixture of people here that sets us apart from the rest of Vancouver," said the owner, Mike Wiebe.
"We deliberately tried to create serendipitous opportunities for people of different backgrounds to meet," said Roger Bayley, the design manager for Olympic Village, citing the more than 100 units of rent-assisted housing in the new complex itself.
After dark, that serendipity is on display in the confines of the Narrow Lounge (1898 Main Street; 604-839-5780; narrowlounge.com), a windowless dive bar tucked below an upholstery store. Down a shadowy, graffiti-tagged stairwell, in a dark-red, womb-like room, an unlikely coalition of bike-riding youths and young professionals mingle over thumping music and classic cocktails — an informal, after-hours tribute to Olympic-spirit together- ness.
Village on False Creek condos
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