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A couple of days after I returned, still disoriented from jet lag, I walked through downtown, along Hastings and into Gastown. Woodward's was gone, or most of it at any rate. Where its modest W had once punctuated the modest skyline, an enormous tower, like something dropped from outer space, loomed over the century-old brick and stone buildings that citizen activism and small-business investment had saved 40 years earlier. It was so out of scale—how had that happened?