“To hear them tell it, downtown L.A. circa 1998 was like Montmartre, the epicenter of bohemian Paris, in 1898. And if downtown L.A. was Montmartre, the Canadian was Le Bateau-Lavoir, the squalid tenement that housed the likes of Pablo Picasso and Amadeo Modigliani in the late 1890s. Before the current attempts to turn it into a yuppie playground, downtown’s Main Street was the kind of petri dish of hunger and humanity that artists crave and thrive on. Right in the middle of it all was the Canadian, where crack and abuelas became absinthe and courtesans, and the party never ended.”