Vancouver
The 100-block of East Hastings Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, the heart of that city's "skid road" neighborhood, lies on a historical skid road. The Vancouver Skid Road was part of a complex of such roads in the dense forests surrounding the Hastings Mill and adjacent to the settlement of Granville, Burrard Inlet (Gastown).
The city began as a sawmill settlement called Granville, in the early 1870s. By at least the 1950s, "Skid Road" was commonly used to describe the more dilapidated areas in the city's Downtown Eastside, which is focused on the original "strip" along East Hastings Street due to a concentration of single room occupancy hotels (SROs) and associated drinking establishments in the area. The area's seedy origins date back to the early concentration of saloons in pre-Canadian Prohibition (1915–1919) and its popularity with loggers, miners and fishermen whose work was seasonal and who spent their salaries in the area's cheap accommodations and public houses.
Opium and heroin use became popular early on; Vancouver was for many years the main port-of-entry for the North American opium supply. During the Great Depression, the railway rights-of-way and other vacant lots in the area were thronged by the unemployed and poor, and the pattern of social decay became well-established. In the 1970s, the endemic alcohol and poverty problems in the area were exacerbated by the expansion of the drug trade, with crack cocaine becoming high-profile in the 1980s as well as a reconcentration of the prostitution trade in the area because of the relocation of hooker strolls in conjunction with city policy for Expo 86.
A portion of Vancouver's Skid Row, Gastown, has also been gentrified; however it is in a difficult coexistence with the nearby impoverished Downtown Eastside along East Hastings Street. Downtown Eastside is infamous for its open drug trade, drug-related deaths (Vancouver's Skid Row has the highest per capita heroin-related deaths in the entire North American continent), prostitution and the highest rate of HIV and Hepatitis C infection in North America.
The poorest urban area in Canada, it is wedged between Downtown, Chinatown and Gastown. These areas are frequented by tourists, and East Hastings Street is a major thoroughfare. These avenues of exposure make the Downtown Eastside a highly visible example of a skid row. The Downtown Eastside (sometimes abbreviated D.T.E.S.) is also home to Insite, the only legal intravenous drug safe injection site in North America, part of a harm reduction policy aimed at helping the area's drug addicted residents.
Read more about this topic: Skid Row