Eastender Blues

I grew up in Regina's east end, and I've recently returned. I hardly left it until I was in my twenties, and I still don't feel totally at home anywhere else. The trouble is, lately I don't feel at home here, either.

I don't want to talk about everything that's wrong with the east end. The critic has talked about that already. Yes, it's tragic that east Regina is turning into a dreadful pastel suburbia full of SUVs and parking lots and ticky-tacky little boxes and bigger boxes where you can buy tacky furniture for your little ticky-tacky box. North Regina is going the same way. It's happened to many, many parts of many other cities, and it will happen to many more. This is sad; but the real tragedy lies less in where these places have gone than in what they've lost getting there.

I know: east Regina was never on anyone's five-neighbourhoods-to-see- before-you-die list. When I was a kid, it was nothing but low-income housing and a highway. When they built the mall, it was across from a plant that made concrete bricks. We lived close to the edge of the city: I could walk a block, and see fields full of stubble. The only thing further east was a lot that sold used trailers. It wasn't exactly pretty.

It wasn't exactly affluent, either. The neighbourhood I lived in was just wealthy enough to be boring. It was full of the sort of families who could afford a house -- but only the sort of house where the builders had cut corners, like using aluminum wiring (legal here in those days) or putting the studs in the walls too far apart to save lumber. There were lots of kids, lots of pickup trucks, lots of street hockey and lots of fights.

This all sounds like a terribly generic blue-collar suburb in the 1980s. It wasn't. It was terrifically, sometimes painfully specific: I was always aware that whatever happened there, good or bad, would never have happened in quite the same way anywhere else. That's why for years I hated it more than any other place on the planet: everything bad that had happened to me happened to me in that particular way because I lived in east Regina. Then I lived in a few other places for a while. Good and bad things happened there, too -- every bit as good and bad as they had been in east Regina, just not quite the same. I didn't hate it anymore. I started to miss it. I didn't have any romantic delusions that things would be better back home; I just missed the peculiar east-Reginan way that things happened there.

And now I'm living here again, and I still miss it. The particularity of east Regina is gone. Instead, there's a certainty that anything here (and increasingly, that anyone here) could be found in just about any other suburb in English-speaking North America.

Some might claim that this is the price of growth and affluence. But any new wealth remains concentrated in a few hands. The nice, new subdivisions have nice, new walls around them; the working-class neighbourhoods are still gritty and, in places, squalid -- perhaps more so than ever. But even the poorer neighbourhoods have no sense of place, now. Thanks to the creeping Walmartization of virtually every major retailer, even squalor has become generic.

What saddens me is that east Regina now seems to signify precisely this generic quality, this utter lack of uniqueness, when the real east Regina was wiped out and paved over almost before it could figure out what it was. It was rough and a bit dodgy, but it was itself, and when you were there, you knew where you were.

A New Power Rises in the East

When I was in high school, the city was divided North-South. The Northenders had mullets, drove Camaros, wore tight black jeans, and listened to heavy metal. They parked their Camaros in the Toys-R-Us parking lot and compared engines of a Friday night. The Southenders were rich, snobby preps who studied for their IB exams and/or got drunk at basketball games of a Friday night - or so my Eastender husband tells me. I would have painted the Southenders differently, being one.

At the time, the East End was dead to me. It only had one high school and a lame mall. It was a non-entity.

Twelve years later, I fear the East End. It is a bloating, teeming, florid conglomeration of our neediest, most thoughtless desires. Feeling lonely, and in need of a new coffee table for a pick-me up? Drive your SUV down a warren of poorly-planned, treeless roads to an Ikea knock-off box store. Want a glass column filled with coloured pebbles for your coffee table? Visit one of many dollar stores or craft bazaars. Crave a faux Italian eating experience? Select from several chain restaurants with patios overlooking neighbouring concrete parking lots. Still not happy? Why not? Don't you live in an enormous beige stucco pasteboard house overlooking mud flats on the eastern edge of the city? Is your daily solo commute downtown not quite long enough to prove that you live in the most desirable eastern location?? Is your lawn sprouting a weed???

I have a feeling this will be the first of a few posts about the east end.