GASTOWN BREAK-IN EDGES OUT EDGY YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR

And That Was After He Saw a Utility Box Serve As Loo and Lunchroom

Alex Moreau is 26, and a young entrepreneur. He is brave enough that
in June of this year he opened a business at 12 East Cordova, just
outside Gastown.

His shop, Defcon 5, was just off the intersection of East Cordova and
Carrall, a nexus of the Downtown Eastside drug trade. When
unsuspecting tourists venture out of Gastown and head south to take a
look at Chinatown, they must run the gamut of the open drug
trafficking going on there. Many of them, even those from big American
cities, come away aghast.

Moreau sold one-of-a-kind clothing pieces and art work. His stuff, he
said, was edgy, but then Moreau has an edge to himself, too. He sports
a thick nose ring and bright tattoos running the length of his arms.
He is a slight guy, though, with a tolerant air about him, and he
thought the neighbourhood, which he knew the city was trying to
redevelop, and which he hoped was getting better, was a good fit for
someone like himself.

"I knew the area was pretty rough," he wrote in an earlier e-mail this
month, "and millions of dollars were going into cleaning it up. I've
had an overwhelming positive response from local business owners and
tenants in the area that support such a creative business that shows
works from up-and-coming creatives and international talent too.

"There are a few new businesses in the area and we all share the plan
of getting an affordable space downtown and waiting things out until
the area flourishes."

But then he added this caution: "It has been getting worse before it
hopefully gets better, though, and we all have our stories of how
difficult it can be to do business down here."

His difficulties started with the unlikeliest of things.

In front of his store, standing on the sidewalk, was a Telus utility
box. It is rectangular. Moreau described it as "about five feet wide
and four feet high, and it stood about a yard in front of one his
store's two front doors. Someone crouching behind it could not be seen
from the street.

Soon enough, he found the utility box was a favourite haunt of
addicts. He came to believe, in fact, that addicts frequented the
intersection because of the utility box. They could eat their dinners
on top of it. It also offered them a hiding place. Crouching down
behind it, they could shoot up, sell drugs or sleep.

Or vomit. Or urinate. Or defecate.

"Everything," Moreau told me in an interview a few weeks after he
wrote his initial e-mail. "From smoking crack to shooting up, from a
guy puking up, to a lady passing out and defecating in her pants,
which pretty much killed business for that afternoon.

"Once they set up a scale on top of the utility box in the shape of
. what's the lady with the blindfold? ... the symbol for justice?
Yeah, Blind Justice! She was holding a little scale and they weighed
out crack on top of the box during mid-afternoon."

To those shoppers who lived or worked in the area, the street scene
wasn't all that much of a deterrent.

"Most people coming into the store are familiar with the area," he
wrote in his e-mail, "so while browsing [at his merchandise], catching
a person smoking crack as a person would see a whale at the aquarium
isn't too big of a shock to them."

But it hurt his walk-by business.

It was not a place tourists wanted to loiter.

Moreau, though, wanted to stick it out. The rent was cheap. He liked
the area and, as Gastown had slowly been improving, he hoped that
improvement would spread south to East Cordova. As for the street
people, he took a cautious, but benign approach to them. He learned to
call many of them by name. Mostly, he felt pity for them.

Still, the Telus box was a problem. He complained to Telus about the
box, to little avail, though a public relations person promised him
Telus would put a rounded top on it so the street people couldn't eat
dinner on it. (Telus spokesman Sean Hall said the box would be painted
to discourage graffiti and that it would approach the city to see if
they can "roughen up" the area behind the box to discourage people
crouching behind it. But moving it, Hall said, would be prohibitively
expensive.)

Moreau made his concerns known to the Gastown Business Improvement
Society. He talked to police. He approached city hall and got promises
from three councillors that they would mention his concerns about the
box to the city's utilities manager.

But the box stayed. Moreau grew more frustrated.

Then, last Saturday, his store was broken into.

It happened some time after his security guards left the store at dawn
and before he opened up. He arrived to find two policemen in his
store, who told him people had been coming in and out for two hours,
looting. He lost about 80 garments -- all of them irreplaceable
one-offs. His flat-screen TV was stolen. He looked out the window of
his store and saw people walking around wearing his merchandise. He
saw one woman wearing one of his hats who, when he plucked it off her
head, screamed that she was going to call the police. She was
schizophrenic, the police told him. They gently shooed her away.

Moreau answered all the police questions, but he got the impression
there was little they could do. Talking to them, and to other area
people, he came to understand that theft was an ever-present
inconvenience that came with doing business in the area and that shop
owners were expected to be extra vigilant in their security measures.

"[Thieves] will cut through drywall," Moreau said. "They'll cut
through locks. One store was broken into through a roof vent, and they
stole $10,000 worth of cigarettes ... and the owner had a security
system.

"But it's an ongoing theme around here. Lots of crime. Tons of
crime.

"I went down there with a live-and-let-live mentality," he said. "But
since the break-in, that was it. I was fed up."

He closed Defcon 5.

It was, in the life of a big city, a small defeat. After years of
stagnation, Gastown is beginning to consolidate into a more vibrant
and viable tourist destination. The Woodward's development will inject
a new resident population into the Downtown Eastside. Chinatown, too,
is remaking itself.

But the instructive lesson that can be taken from Moreau's experience
is this: For all the planning these areas have received, for all the
millions of dollars spent down there in redevelopment, the problems of
the open-air drug market in the Downtown Eastside are so corrosive and
so intractable that something as inconsequential as the placement of a
Telus utility box can have an unforeseen effect. As a case of
collateral damage in the war against drugs, Moreau should be seen as a
warning. Consolidating a beachhead down there is going to be a very,
very delicate business.

As for Moreau?

He had an offer of rental space on the edge of Chinatown. He took it.
He is busy setting up shop there now. He is going to try again.