Photo from the Vancouver Sun Article | Vancouver artist and jazz musician Al Neil has been occupying a cabin by the waterfront in North Vancouver for decades. The cabin is slated to be removed by Jan. 31 to make way for property development.
Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, SUN. See all here.
“For over 150 years squatters — artists, sailors who had jumped ship, bohemians and people unable or unwilling to pay rent — have made improvised homes for themselves along the shores of the Fraser River, Vancouver Harbour and Burrard Inlet.
Many were simply looking for a place to live, but others, including novelist Malcolm Lowry, poets Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay, and Al Purdy and whale expert and Greenpeace founder Paul Spong used their homes as sites for important creative work.
More recently photographer Stan Douglas and visual artist Ken Lum have created works based on the homes of artists on the Burrard Inlet foreshore.
Now, the last surviving example of the unofficial residences on Burrard Inlet — a cabin near Cates Park on the North Shore that has served artistic collaborators Al Neil and Carole Itter variously as a residence and an artist’s workshop for decades — is under threat. Neil and Itter still use and maintain the one-room cabin, which has no plumbing and appears to be in sound condition.”