A new restaurant has opened in Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside (DTES) area. And lo and behold, there’s an ongoing protest against it:
A just-opened upscale restaurant in the heart of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has become a lightning rod for anti-gentrification protesters.
Pidgin co-owner Brandon Grossutti said protesters have told him their goal is to get his restaurant — viewed as a symbol of encroaching gentrification in the neighbourhood — to shut down.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Grossutti. “I’ve sunk my heart and soul into this project. Closing my restaurant is not a solution to anything. It would just put a bunch of people out of work.
Protesters have been picketing almost daily outside Pidgin, which opened Feb. 1 at 350 Carrall St., across the street from the notorious drug-riddled Pigeon Park.
Grossutti said protesters have vandalized his restaurant, harassed and yelled at customers, taken their photos, and shone flashlights into the eyes of patrons dining inside.
“It’s been really aggressive,” he said. “It’s bordering on adolescent behaviour.”
Millions upon millions of public dollars are paid into the DTES’s ‘Poverty Industry’ each month, paying the salaries of thousands of people. It’s simply not in their interest for improvements to ever come to the DTES. For anyone who thinks that this “protest” is an authentic grassroots affair, a single sentence later in the article reveals the truth:
The protest is being organized by the Carnegie Community Action Project.
A quick check of the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) reveals more. One of the key people there is Jean Swanson. I knew her when I was a kid in the early 1970’s. She’s been a “community organizer” all of her life. She has been gainfully employed for a long time as such. In the minds of her and her fellow ‘activists’, they are enlightened and righteous. Much like devout religionists members of a religious cult, they can do no wrong, for their truth is absolute. That even extends to doing everything they can to destroy the fortunes of an entrepreneur, who has invested his time, energy, & money to build a business, employ people, and improve the area.
Thought experiment: Imagine there was a fellow restauranteur named Gene Swanson (fictitious name), who owned an establishment a few blocks away in Gastown. Further imagine that he hired a bunch of thugs to protest Brandon Grossutti’s new restaurant, scaring away potential customers. How are the CCAP’s actions any different?
I hope Grossutti sues them. I’m confident that most Vancouverites would applaud him.
