Agreed. The last time I walked on Hastings near Main I was pretty scared. Not like the old days when all you had to put up with were Loggers, miners, seamen. All drunk, of course, but having good times.

Because my parents worked Friday nights, one of my earliest Richmond childhood memories is crossing one of the rickety Fraser River bridges with neighbours who shopped at the Marpole Safeway.

I now live in Victoria where all Safeways were bought and converted into Save-On Foods. If the Marpole Safeway still stands, it’s probably slated to be rebranded as Freshco by Sobeys.

Gotta say, Every Place Has A Story is precisely the kind of feature that would help attract readers to The Province or The Vancouver Sun (where Eve once worked). Frankly, I don’t know what the Sun will do when—before much longer—John Mackie packs it in.

John’s heritage features, Mac Parry, a few columnists and the increasingly infrequent Exclusive Investigations are the kind of eyeball attractants—other than obits, comics and crosswords/Sudoko—that make the venerable newspaper still relevant in an instant-news age.