An 'Aquaman' Crew Member Got Stabbed on Canada’s Most Infamous Drinking Street

Newfoundlanders are their own worst enemies. For every athletic triumph, there is a guy doing illegal dick surgery in the woods; for every brief economic windfall, there is some money-pit of a megaproject waiting to suck it all up; and for every success in shoring up the island's burgeoning movie industry, there is some drunk ready to stab a member of the film crew at a George Street afterparty.

Of course one of the members of the Aquaman production team was going to get stabbed downtown last weekend by a guy from Mount Pearl. It is cosmically illegal for us to have nice things, and nothing reaffirms the dark allure of George Street quite like a random act of drunken violence. (For those playing the home game, the RNC also arrested a man wielding an axe downtown on Saturday night.)

Like life on the island itself, everyone in St. John's has a complicated relationship to George Street, a two-block stretch downtown that boasts dozens of bars that is arguably the drunkest spot per capita in Canada. On the one hand, it's got a ton of bars selling more-or-less cheap booze and live music all hours of the night pretty much 24/7/365. On the other hand, it's got a ton of bars selling more-or-less cheap booze and live music all hours of the night pretty much 24/7/365.

You can see how your experience might go one way or the other—occasionally all within the same night—depending on when and where you find yourself down there.

Strike upon a good night, and a trip to George is among the grandest times you will ever have in your life. There is a bar to suit everyone's taste: Irish pubs full of live trad music; dance clubs from the scuzzy to the sparkling where you can get your grind on; kitschy dives and impossibly hip after-hours joints; Lottie's, home of the No Cover Ever $4.50 White Russian, a storied institution beyond compare or explanation. It does Mardi Gras in October (for some reason) and occasionally the entire street transforms into an open-air kitchen party—the week-long George Street music festival at the end of every July is one of the biggest concert events in the province. The whole spot is great fun, last call isn't until 3 AM, you are liable to see everyone you've ever known in the midst of a pleasant buzz on and late-night munchies abound.

As for a bad night…. well. You'd be hard pressed to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. A whole street filled with blackout drunks rowdy on the rum—yes b'y. All the ills of the demon liquor magnified and concentrated into a single point with some cocaine and rohypnol and God knows what else thrown into the mix, shaken and stirred and unleashed upon the city in the small hours of the morning. You can't get a cab and you can't shake the creep trailing you and everything you eat in a desperate bid to sober up will give you a devilish bout of the sinner's ass. To top it all off, the oil boom is over but the biker gangs are already here and everyone's still got a drug problem and now they all have weapons. Even the UUS Navy is allegedly afraid of the place, although I doubt it's stopped any sailors from drinking there, and I'd suggest any seaman scared of some sketchy fun on shore leave might be in the wrong line of work.

Lord knows the street has its demons, but generally disorderly drinking holes tend to be symptomatic of social problems rather than their cause. Drugs, violence, and sexual aggression in Newfoundland and Labrador go beyond its raucous nightlife and stem from many deeper dysfunctions. The dismal state of the province's policing/prison/mental healthcare system(s) and our moribund economy are just a few of the bigger items on the list ahead of the local bar scene—although, obviously, the province's heroic commitment to alcohol consumption doesn't really help matters either.

But that said, last week's high-profile stabbing of a cultural worker notwithstanding, things on the street are generally getting better since cameras were installed in 2011. The RNC recorded 60 fights and 37 assaults on George Street in 2010; in 2014, the cops were just called to 26 fights. The violence understandably gets all the attention, but street's biggest problems are much more pedestrian. Literally: George Street is the city's only real pedestrian street, but it makes terrible use of that public space, and the place is more or less totally dead during the daytime. More options for families and the sober to hang around the place would go a long way to cleaning things up.

In the interim, if you do find yourself having a time on George Street, it's relatively unlikely that you have to worry very much about being punched or stabbed or shot or chased around with an axe. Relatively.

But when in doubt, there is always one cardinal rule that will never steer you wrong: don't trust anyone from Mount Pearl.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.