It’s a shame we couldn’t save the 1st Pantages, or the 2nd in the unit block West Hastings for that matter. Or the Capitol, demolished to make way for the Capitol 6 which lasted only ~30 years.. or any of the other long gone movie palaces (Strand, Lyric)…

The 1st Pantages is infamous for the following legendary Vancouver event….

January 16, 1953

The novel Tobacco Road had been out for 21 years, a play based on it ran on Broadway for 3,182 performances, and a movie had appeared in 1941, but when the stage production of Erskine Caldwell’s book hit Vancouver in 1953 there was one hell-thumpin’ ruckus in these parts.

Tobacco Road was about the trials and tribulations of Jeeter Lester and his family, folks for whom the phrase “poor white trash” was invented. The language was crude (for the time) and at one point Vancouver actor Doug Haskins, with his back to the audience, appeared to be peeing into a cornfield.

Someone complained to the police and on January 16, 1953—Nine members of the Vancouver Police walked out on stage at the Avon Theatre during the third act and arrested five members of the cast on obscenity charges. The audience, nearly 1,000 strong, protested loudly, then—after brief remarks by the director, Dorothy Davies—settled back into their seats to wait.

Ninety minutes later, bail of $100 each having been paid, the five performers returned and finished the play. The charges were later dropped.

Gassy Jack,
I don’t think anyone is arguing against saving the Pantages theatre, just the last deal proposed was not the right deal. Also I’m not so sure it was only the ancient history that was a problem, even the current history is a little suspect.

http://foresttalk.com/index.php/2009/03/27/worthington-properties-offices-burn-down

JJJ, wow, I never made the connection between the two stories until you pointed this out. Nice digging by you and mezz.

I still don’t think this lets our politicians, bureaucrats, and Heritage Commission off the hook for letting this happen, though. But I know, I was ranting again. This whole thing just boils my blood so much… and I hate being so powerless to do anything about it. C’est la vie. But if there is any new info anyone can add about the Pantages and what’s going on, I’d be grateful if you posted it here.

So, back to the discussion Bill has reinitiated. And to the issue of cachements, it might help to put this into the context of growth projections done by Metro Van, who estimate that by 2040:

City of Vancouver’s population will increase by 140,000 — from about 630,000 now to 770,000.

About 70,000 new dwelling units will be needed to accomodate that influx.

This represents about a 25% increase in building density.

However, since most of this growth will have to occur outside downtown, which is already over-built, the density increases in the residential neighbourhoods targeted will be very substantial.

No matter how you slice it — towers or laneway houses — if these projections are anywhere close to accurate, the opportunity this represents to developers is huge. They’re all going to stay busy and make lots of $$$. And so will the City.

But what will happen to our neighbourhoods in the process?

What Lewis and Michael and others have been presenting here gives me hope that this level of evaluation and planning is also occurring inside City Hall at the Planning Department. But from what we’ve been seeing for the last two decades (ie. leading to downtown becoming so overbuilt), and especially since 2005, suggests that our top dogs in planning don’t really have much of a plan at all, and are flying by the seat of their pants most of the time.

Change is badly needed.

…weigh in….. (oh my)

Coming up on the radar: TL is considering raising rapid transit to Surrey as a priority over vancouver’s broadway line. A new regional growth strategy is being drafted over the next few weeks to flesh this out.

“Metro Vancouver’s chief bureaucrat wants TransLink to bump a proposed rapid transit line to the University of B.C. to the bottom of its priority list, and instead boost services in the fast-growing area south of the Fraser River.

Metro chief administrative officer Johnny Carline said Friday that Surrey will bear the brunt of the region’s growth in the next 30 years, and more transit is needed to help shape that city’s development.”

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Metro+pushes+transit+Surrey/3481310/story.html#ixzz0ydb7JaSc

Teacher’s back, I’m handing in my history essay in time for the Sunday Brunch…

“It would, moreover, be quite shortsighted not to recognize the extraordinary achievements of modern city planning in contrast to that of old in the field of hygiene. In this our modern engineers, so much maligned because of their artistic blunders, have literally performed miracles and have rendered everlasting service to mankind. It is largely due to their work that the sanitary conditions of European cities have improved so remarkably—as is apparent from mortality figures which have in many cases been halved. How many individual improvements must have transpired, to the benefit of all city dwellers, for such results to emerge! This we gladly grant, but there still remains the question as to whether it is really necessary to purchase these advantages at the tremendous price of abandoning all beauty in the layout of our cities.”

—Camillo Sitte, “Der Städtbeau” (Vienna, 1889); closing remarks from Chapter X: Artistic Limitations.

“New York, whatever its virtues, has never paid much attention to the niceties of a public environment; as a city, we are the ultimate example of Galbraith’s observation about private affluence and public squalor.”

—Paul Goldberger, in New York the City Observed (1979).

Therein lies our plight. Perched here in the western frontier of the English culture, will we succumb to our baser natures and count value simply in terms of our personal fortune? Or will we make our isolation and relative sense of lawless independence an opportunity to forge ground?

Utopia indeed. It is difficult to say how much of our cultural patrimony was involved with “good” urbanism. Sir Thomas More lost his head in a challenge to his Monarch, leaving no indication that although he lived in the sixteenth century he was a Renaissance man. In the following century the improbable figure of Inigo Jones brought to the land of the Thames the fruits of the Italian Renaissance for (partial) consumption.
London traded with Venice and Amsterdam, and fought with Paris and Rome. By 1600 urbanism in Paris was taking firm hold. The French King Henri’s daughter was married to the King of England, Charles I. His head fell in front of the Inigo Jones designed Banquet Hall in Westminster—classical, Roman, and not to be emulated as a model of any king.

Ours tradition was born in a tale of two cities: The City—London proper, with the footprint of the Roman castrum, the point of origin for all the Roman roads England all the way to Hardian’s Wall, the site of the Roman bridge, and of St. Paul’s; and Westminster—the upstream home of the Crown, the Abbey, the Parliament Buildings, and Big Ben. On the periphery of Westminster are St. James’s Park, Downing Street, and the Banqueting House. Charing Cross is the point of intersection for the road linking Westminster and the City. Christopher Wren’s plan for the reconstruction of The City after the fire surely must have seemed like a power grab by a newly re-instituted monarchy.

What the merchants settled for instead was an urban code. It set building heights in proportion to the width of the fronting street; building types that stipulated construction standards, and materials; and a law that expropriated private property that had not rebuilt by a prescribed period of time.

However, the rise of the British Empire would have to wait another half century of struggle, and is marked by the signing of the Treaty of Utrech. With some significant consequences for the lands of Acadia in our Maratimes, with the Utrech agreement England wrestled control of the trade in African people from the other European powers, most notably France and Holland. The next year the British Empire was formed. Setting up a quadrant of key trading nodes in Liverpool, north-west Africa, the Caribean, and New Amsterdam (New York), the British Empire was in ascendancy. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St. George, in Bloomsbury, dates to this very time declaring the arrival of a new power on the scene that would not so much assume the Classical mantel, as try to redefine it in its own terms.

The workmanship is first rate. In the design vocabulary I sense the absence of the sure handedness and timeless serenity of the Greek and Roman models. An ingredient or two are missing from the formula in the hands of a gifted designer.

A century later, with the death of mad King George, the most ambitious foray into urban planning came to a grinding halt. John Nash was out, and a teenage Queen and her consort were in. From what I can read in the Victorian style, it was as if the flower children of San Francisco had ascended the White House. Whomever the handlers behind the monarchy were, things went from bad to worse.

Absent the knowledge of the possibility of microscopic cargo, international trade had brought Bubonic Plague to Europe—and via Venice and the Venetian Fleet, to the docks of the Thames—starting in 1348.

The second Cholera pandemic hit America and Britain in the 1830’s. By 1858 Fleet Street was pronouncing “The Summer of the Big Stink” rising from the stench in the Thames. In 1899 Doctor John Snow, anesthesiologist to the Queen, proved with his etymology map of the last Cholera epidemic that the business of urbanism must be managed on the basis of scientific principles applied for the public good, rather than the politics of profit of the landed property.

Meanwhile, Paris had been reshaped into our first modern metropolis. A constant trickle—I was recently told—of British municipal officials started touring the French Capital in the middle of the 19th century.

What they saw was a working model of what investments in infrastructure, neighbourhood intensification, and street revitalization can bring. Transportation had been re-planned along rational lines. State of the art sewers, water and gas distribution was burried below new streets lined with rows of trees set in place as fully mature specimens. Fronting the boulevards redevelopment came with new buildings—all more or less alike—and local access streets. The boulevards ran along the edges of the quartiers, and the centralized planning delivered markets, schools, hospitals, parks and prisons.

It all built amidst political struggle and the rising capitalism, but the facile dismissal that it was all about breaking up the rabble glosses over too much urbanism that is still missing in our midst.

We are children of a lesser God for being a British colony. Yet, we dismiss to our great loss the fact that Great Britain finally did get the urbanism right. And it was not queasy about finding it in the places of rivals and allies alike, including Germany, France, Italy and Holland.

We are heirs to a difficult urbanist thread. Can we reinterpret our history as a journey towards liberty and common ground? Maximum freedom within agreed upon boundaries? Paradox has never been a kind or gentle mistress to embrace.

Welcome back Frances. I look forward to our conversation with Jim Green and Bill Good on Tuesday at 9 on CKNW.

A few musings on the Pantages theatre and adjacent block. As a former member of the Building Community Society I sat in on a number of discussions with Marc Williams who claimed to own the property. Also in attendance were other community leaders keen to see this entire block redeveloped.

Williams confirmed that when he bought the properties he expected to get sufficient heritage density to make the deal work. However, as others have previously noted on this blog, there is a serious problem with the amount of density still sitting in the density bank, and this is the reason the city was not prepared to ‘print more money/heritage density’ and give it to him

I should also add that IMO the developer didn’t have a realistic proposition in terms of redeveloping the property….the amount of development he was suggesting would not fit on the site, and when I noted this, he responded that his solution was a 12 storey tower or something like that.

He had no pro-formas, no realistic understanding of costs, and since I wanted to see something happen, my conclusion was that the only solution might be for him to offer to sell to the city at a price that would make sense for all. I told him that I didn’t necessarily support the city buying the site, but I didn’t believe he had the wherewithall to make it happen.

I understand that Williams did in fact offer the property to the city, initially at a ridiculously high price. But eventually, an agreement on price was achieved. However, the new regime at City Hall didn’t like the proposition of acquiring this site and being responsible for renovating the theatre any more than the last regime and that’s why we are in the situation we are today.

It’s a shame, but I can’t really blame any one party for the current situation other than Worthington. The real shame is that someone else didn’t buy it before they did. Despite a lot of nice words, they didn’t look after the sites. But that’s now water under the bridge.

I gather thought has been given to a number of different proposals that might combine market and non-market housing and either a restored Pantages, or a new small theatre within the block. However, as someone has noted, SFU now has a new theatre, and that might exacerbate the likelihood of finding more money for this venture….. unless a well-heeled private donor who wants to see the DTES became a true cultural heart for the city came forward.

You never know. The property is now on the market. As long as the powers at be in the neighbourhood don’t come out against ANY market housing, something positive could still happen. But if they do, you can expect to see this block, and many other blocks in the area continue to rot. And that would be a real pity.

Thanks for your insights into the machinations of this, Michael. It’s hard for an observer to fathom what’s been going on – and from the Pantages Theatre Society you have an entirely different view, of course: a $1 million private donor from Chinatown, the overwhelming support of the Arts community (who rarely looked favourably on any of Sue Harvey’s decrees), and even a grand-nephew of Pantages in the mix. The slow death of the theatre is almost as interesting (and sordid) as its long life on the vaudeville circuit.

So, yes, the lack of political will is surely the result of a number of different factors. Location, bad timing and bad luck included.

But the last few years we have also seen the Planning Department run roughshod over the City’s long-established heritage preservation programs and bylaws. They are directly responsible for the HAHR, the moratorium on Heritage Density Transfer, and Standards of Maintenance bylaws being ignored, while at the same time pushing at every turn for more over-height buildings and more condo towers in the Historic Area.

So I would suggest that the real root of the problem (and it directly relates to both neighbourhood liveability as well as site-specific demolitions like the Pantages Theatre, Maxines, and other landmarks in the city) is the lack of a comprehensive Neighbourhood Plan being in place, one that clearly identifies the neighbourhood’s assets and values that govern the decision-making process.

No more lip service, freebie relaxations, or sham consultations like the HAHR, when you only get two choices and both of them stink. We can’t afford to sit on our hands waiting for a white knight to save the Pantages, or our neighbourhoods.

The best and most efficient solution I have heard (and often repeated on this blog) is to undertake a neighbourhood planning charrette. It is at this level that consensus and certainty is most needed right now.

A charrette would set clear growth targets for build-out at the neighbourhood level and then develop a consensus on the best way to get there. Metro and Condon and others have done excellent work at the macro level but, as Bill says, we need to focus more on the micro level; and for Lewis and Urbie, that means a quartier-based approach. As Michael says, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t make any sense, especially (I would add) in a city with such distinct neighbourhoods. Local knowledge is a wonderful asset in planning, and it seems that charrettes help bring that knowledge into the forefront.

Again, with 70,000 new dwelling units expected by 2040 – a 25% increase across the City – there’s no reason at all to assume that developers and the City will be hard up regardless of what kind of growth plan a charrette yields. In this, the Historic Area is no different than the West End, Marpole, or any other neighbourhood in our city that has been targeted to absorb a huge amount of density in the decades to come. If anything, the building sector will benefit from the certainty and it will enable them to streamline approvals.

In any event, it’s better to try to build consensus sooner than later, or else the battles, bad press, and divisiveness will continue to be a problem for any Council that holds office.

And who knows how many more travesties like the Pantages we’ll take to the grave.

And I though Mtl already had white roofs, at least for a few months of the year.