East Van Cross evolves from badass warning into gift embraced across the city

Ken Lum created the East Van Cross as a monument to a place he knew—one shaped by fear, survival, and poverty. Today, it sits at Clark and 6th Avenue as an illuminated public sculpture, a Best of Vancouver award winner, and a symbol of pride that adorns Christmas ornaments, craft-market earrings, handmade candles, and keychains. It's splashed across purses sold at the Weirdos Market and craft beer cans at Parallel 49 Brewing Company.

The symbol's arc traces a neighbourhood's arc. In the 1960s and 70s, the graffiti cross was drawn on dumpsters, abandoned buildings, and alleys as a warning—a way to tell outsiders they'd entered the badass side of town, a place far removed from the shiny, progressive East Vancouver of today. The City of Vancouver commissioned Lum to transform that image into sculpture as part of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic public art program.

Lum, now based in Philadelphia, sees the monument through a more complex lens than the pride narrative that dominates its reception. "It's like the crucifix, right, where Christ died," he told the Georgia Straight. "As for the work, everyone is always talking about spinning the positive—the pride of being East Van. But I used to give interviews where I'd say, 'I would have given you a hundred bucks if I could have lived on the west side.' So it's not just about pride. It's also about fear, religiosity, and survival mode. And it's also about death."

He's not speaking hypothetically. Lum attended Gladstone Secondary as a teenager when noon-hour fights were "an unofficial part of the curriculum" and eye contact was risky in the hallways. A protector—who later became a Vancouver police staff sergeant—told him: "If anyone pushes you into a locker when you're bending over, you tell me who it was and I'll beat the shit out of them." That felt normal to a kid trying to survive high school.

On a personal level, Lum sees the monument differently still. "I hope this doesn't come across as a little bit morbid, but I look at it now and also see it as my tombstone," he said. "So when I pass, I'll be remembered for it, and any artist is flattered by that."

The East Van Cross has become woven into the fabric of a gentrified neighbourhood that began its transformation in the 1990s—a neighbourhood where Lum would no longer need protection.