A visit to the Carnegie Community Centre makes you think about what we mean when we say “community.” It’s Friday, January 19th and I’m coming up the steps of Carnegie with 2005 mayoral candidate Peter Haskell. The crowd of people outside the 104-year-old building tries to sell us everything from syringes to Tylenol-Threes. Haskell is one of many who are forbidden to use the facilities at Carnegie, but as we enter, nobody seems to notice him. As soon as we enter, staff throws somebody out for being intoxicated. “This is a dry building,” he says. Haskell is barred because of having spoken out against user fees being charged for a theatre contest. “It was for voicing my egalitarian values,” said Haskell, “but what was worse is that someone from Carnegie called my house and had a long conversation with my mother about how I should be on medication.” We line up for the “birthday party” snack. Twenty minutes later they start giving out food. Ten minutes after that, all the food is gone. There is another identical line-up on the second floor. We each get a meatball, a tiny samosa, and a tiny sausage roll. In the line-up we meet Edwin Cruz, from El Salvador, who tells us proudly of his six-month pregnant wife that he is waiting to get food for. As we eat, four staff escort a guy out the door. He yells “Get your hands off me!” as he struggles to keep from losing his morsels of food.

On January 10th, a homeless man, Bill Simpson, was also barred from Carnegie. According to The Downtown Eastside Enquirer, Simpson had been blogging anti-Carnegie sentiments using one of the computers in the learning centre. Carnegie staff then went in to the computer after he had done and found what he had been writing on the internet. Simpson was mostly just saying that the poor are being squeezed between the government, the cops, and organizations like the Carnegie, The Union Gospel Mission, and The Salvation Army.

I meet another man who has been kicked off the property. Ricky, a big first-nations man, speaks with a somber tone and chooses his words very carefully. “They kicked me out of Carnegie,” he says, “They say it was because I smelled.” This is doubly interesting because Ricky’s picture appears several times in the recent Carnegie Newsletter, as he waited patiently at a City Council Meeting. “I’m a warrior,” says Ricky, “and I’m not going to let them tear down my community.”

The demographics of the Birthday party are overwhelmingly Southeast Asian; at least fifty percent. It’s at least 30% visible first-nations, and 15% Hispanic. There are tables where people sit to talk, read the paper, and play chess, cribbage, or mah-jongg. Outside is a covered space where people can smoke in an area recently fenced off from the market frenzy on the street. Upstairs is a cafeteria where you can get a meal for $2.50, a boiled egg for 35 cents or a coffee for 50 cents. Bowls of soup, at 75 cents, are very popular. All the instructions printed on signs are in English and Chinese. In the basement there is a weight room, pool tables, and a TV room. There is a small branch of the Vancouver Public Library in the building and it is perpetually busy. All the washrooms have those white lights that are supposed to make it hard for intravenous drug users to be able to see a vein to shoot up, but there are needle drop box receptacles on the walls. The washrooms are scary enough, but the lights give them an extra spooky appearance.

That day there are several events scheduled. The trip to the Museum of Anthropology is cancelled. There is a dance with a live band that sings classic rock. On the third floor is a lecture on climate change offered by Humanities 101. It’s up a long spiral staircase with fenced off stain-glass windows and marble steps that have been worn down by more than a century of use. Dr Tara Ivonochko, who facilitates the lecture, is very pregnant and that image of a pregnant woman working hard to save the world is a more powerful image than the Keeling graph that she tries to explain to the people who have gathered in the lecture hall.

It brings me back to the point about what we mean when we say “community.”

Carnegie has recently had a lot of changes on their board and on their staff. They are trying hard to change their image by such actions such as groups of seniors picketing Tourism Information Offices and saying “welcome to Vancouver” and handing tourists information about the gentrification that’s been going on here. But critics of the Carnegie are quick to point out that Carnegie management make upwards of $50 000 per year, while volunteers work hours for enough meal tickets to be able to buy something to eat in the cafeteria.