Photograph by Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun

The Marine Building penthouse is, incredibly, more or less intact, although it’s now used as an office.

When it was built in 1930, the Marine Building was the tallest building in the British Empire. To show off its dazzling waterfront view, an observation deck was built on the top floor, with a huge wraparound terrace.

The cost of taking in the view was a mere 25 cents. But that proved too much for the masses during the Great Depression, and the observation deck was soon closed. By 1933, the builders were in such dire financial straits they sold the art deco masterpiece for $900,000, a fraction of the $2.3 million it cost to build it.

A.J.T. Taylor ran the British Pacific Building Co., the new owner. He decided to install the company offices on the 19th floor, then came up with an ingenious idea for the observation deck – to convert it into a penthouse apartment for Taylor, his wife and their two kids.

The Marine Building penthouse became one of the legendary spaces in Vancouver, a two-storey art deco wonder. Incredibly, it’s still more or less intact, although it’s now used as an office.

The current tenant is Phil Boname of Urbanics Consultants. He will be hosting a $100 a pop fundraiser for Heritage Vancouver at the penthouse tonight, and even allowed The Vancouver Sun in to take a peek.

It doesn’t disappoint.

“It’s special because it’s part of the whole experience of the Marine Building, that jazz age-art deco style,” says Don Luxton of Heritage Vancouver.

“Taylor had amazing taste. He was inspired by Rockefeller Center [in New York]. It has that kind of high art deco movie set feel to it.”

The observation deck was originally one big room, with a 20-foot high ceiling. Taylor installed a mezzanine on the western side which contained two bedrooms and an open sitting area. Underneath the mezzanine was the dining room and kitchen.

He raised the floor two feet in the living room so that you could take in the panoramic views through the windows while sitting in a chair. But the living room still has an 18-foot ceiling, and with light streaming in through the 12-foot-high windows, it’s a very dramatic space.

“It’s very inspirational,” says Boname.

“People tell me my voice changed when I moved in here. The tone became philosophical, softer.”

He laughs like a guy who can’t believe his luck. So would you, if you got to work in a drop-dead gorgeous space with a teak floor, an enormous black marble fireplace and a curved built-in bookcase.

There have some changes, of course. The Marine Building underwent some questionable renos in the early ’80s, when some teak walls and a teak balcony were either removed, covered with drywall or painted white. A glass wall was installed in the mezzanine, breaking up the open plan and cutting off the air circulation. The original chandelier was even replaced with a more modern one.

Thankfully the upstairs bathroom survived, completely intact. It is out of this world, with walls done up in green, gold, black and blue tiles, an aqua-marine floor and a butter-coloured tub. There’s a button to call the help, a stainless steel rack to heat the towels and a window which gives you a deadly view of the harbour.

One of the quirks of the space is that the mezzanine windows are the top of the first floor windows, so they’re all at floor level. Another quirk is that you step down from the living room into the old dining room and kitchen, cause it’s at the original level of the floor. The dining room is now an office, but the galley kitchen is still there.

You access the terrace through a door in the old dining room. Sadly city planners allowed the new Fairmont Pacific hotel/condos to be built directly north, which cuts down the water view. But the vistas are still breathtaking, whether you’re looking up Hastings, Burrard, or out to Coal Harbour.

The coolest aspect of the terrace is a pair of lion statues on the eastern side. Taylor was part of the consortium that built the Lion’s Gate Bridge and developed the British Properties; the statues are small “maquette” versions of the lions Charles Margera sculpted for either end of the bridge.

Taylor didn’t actually live there long; his wife apparently hated living on the top of an office building, even after Taylor installed a small private elevator so you didn’t have to walk from the 18th floor to the 20th. After Taylor moved out, the city directory lists a Mrs. Mary Fisher in the penthouse from 1941 to 1944. In 1947 the penthouse was converted to an office by the Spencer department store family, and it’s been an office ever since.

Still, with a bit of imagination it’s easy to see it as your own art deco mansion in the sky. There may be bigger and more opulent modern penthouses in Vancouver, but none are cooler.

At press time there was only one ticket left for the Heritage Vancouver fundraiser, which takes place from 5:30 p.m to 7:30 p.m. tonight. For information, go to the Heritage Vancouver website: www.heritagevancouver.org/, phone 604-331-8430 or e-mail info@heritagevancouver.org.

Vancouver — Thirteen years ago, Charles Barber’s music tutor, Paul Kling – or PK, as he liked to be called – suggested an impromptu drive to Mexico from their homes in California. The trip marked the first time Barber had ever seen his friend without a jacket, tie and vest. But as relaxed as he was that day, Kling, a Czech virtuoso violinist and retired chair of the University of Victoria’s School of Music, did not roll up the sleeves of his white shirt.

“I realized I had spent years indulging in magical thinking,” acknowledges Barber, now conductor and artistic director of City Opera Vancouver. “I knew PK was Jewish, I just presumed he’d escaped the war hiding out in a cave in Switzerland, or something.”

He put the last pieces of the puzzle together when he was advised by another of Kling’s former students to read Music in Terezin 1941-1945, by Joza Karas. “There was a Pavel Kling who featured prominently,” says Barber. “And I knew instantly that was PK.”

Theresienstadt concentration camp (termed Terezin in Czech) was the so-called “model ghetto,” where the Gestapo grouped together educated Jews, including many musicians who were forced to create orchestras and jazz bands to perform for the Nazi propaganda machine.

Kling had been deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. Just 15 years of age, he already displayed signs of a prodigious talent. Dubbed “the little one” by fellow prisoner Karel Ancerl (later conductor of the Toronto Symphony), Kling received instruction from many of the camp’s musicians, at one point sharing sleeping quarters with two conductors, three composers, a poet and a number of teachers. He was a member of several of the camp’s ensembles, including the orchestra working on The Emperor of Atlantis.

With music by Viktor Ullmann and libretto by Petr Kien, The Emperor of Atlantis is an hour-long chamber opera – and a political allegory: The eponymous anti-hero Emperor Uberall’s brutality becomes so egregious, Death himself rebels and refuses to kill people. The score is sharply satirical, employing many musical references including a version of Deutschland Uber Alles, set to a Bach-inflected chorale.

The piece was into full rehearsals before an SS officer figured out the subtext – and promptly shut down the production. The entire company was shipped to Auschwitz in September of 1944. All but two perished there: Kling and one other member survived. They lied and persuaded the guards they were simply engineers and had nothing to do with the music. They were sent to the slave labour area of Auschwitz-Birkenau and survived to see the Russians advance and the camp liberated the following January.

“Thirty years later,” notes Barber. “PK came to the West and became my teacher.” And 13 years after that fateful trip to Mexico, The Emperor of Atlantis is having its B.C. premiere in Vancouver.

Produced on a shoestring budget of $127,000, the production is presented in partnership with the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. With no budget for advertising, Barber and his colleagues have been working hard at spreading the remarkable story of this opera and Professor Kling, who died in 2005.

“We have held 44 talks to try and build an audience,” Barber says. “At one, an elderly woman came up to me afterward and said, ‘Thank you for talking about this – I was there.’ I didn’t have a single word in me. I simply held her hand.”

Of the approximately 200 known Holocaust survivors living in Vancouver, seven or eight were at Theresienstadt. The opening performance will include many survivors in the audience, and will be attended by B.C.’s Lieutenant-Governor, Steven Point. Though the opera itself runs just an hour, a 30-40 minute prologue has been devised to remember the history and put the work into context.

“This is the first time I have ever warned the singers and orchestra to be prepared for audible sobs and cries from the audience,” says Barber.

Tickets for the remaining four evenings are selling slowly. Even if all five performances sell out, City Opera will only break even. Barber has waived his $5,000 fee for directing and conducting the piece. “We decided we would continue regardless – even if we lose our shirts,” he insists. “The entire company is so proud to be associated with such an important production.

“Ullmann wrote a masterpiece: Had he not been murdered, you and I would know his name today,” Barber concludes. “This work needs to be heard – and it needs to be heard in British Columbia, where my teacher spent many years inspiring young musicians. My teacher – Paul Kling – who worked on this opera, and who the Nazis tried to kill.”

The Emperor of Atlantis plays at the Norman Rothstein Theatre in Vancouver, Feb. 4, 7, 9 and 11 at 8 p.m. www.cityoperavancouver.com.

Event notice – The Emperor of Atlantis

Agrees to buy, renovate and hand over theatre in exchange for tower

Council is trying to help save the York Theatre, also known as The Raja Cinema. – Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, The Province

Vancouver developer Bruno Wall has offered to spend up to $12 million to buy and restore the historic York Theatre, now slated to be torn down Jan. 15 to make way for townhomes.

Wall has also offered to hand ownership to the city — in exchange for development rights equivalent to a 20-storey building, to be built on an as-yet undetermined city site.

The 500-seat theatre, opened in 1912 near the north end of Commercial Drive, was home to the Vancouver Little Theatre, where a number of local actors launched their careers. It later hosted musical acts and Bollywood films.

But it has been empty for several years. EDG Homes bought the property for $960,000 in August 2007 after being assured by city staff that there was no historical significance or interest in the theatre.

The city has approved EDG’s townhouse proposal, which is now eligible for building permits. Demolition of the theatre is legally permitted as of Jan. 15.

Yesterday, EDG’s Peter Phillips warned council that ongoing development costs and liabilities would force him to demolish the theatre and proceed with the townhouses if no deal for a sale is completed.

In March, the city’s attitude toward the site changed. The Vancouver Heritage Commission ruled that it was eligible for listing in the Vancouver Heritage Register.

Arts groups that want the theatre saved argued its restoration would provide the hub for a cultural district when combined with the nearby Vancouver East Cultural Centre and the cafes and galleries bordering Commercial Drive.

Yesterday, after learning that Wall had stepped forward with cash that arts groups and theatre fans have failed for years to raise, council agreed to offer Wall the unusual density deal to encourage him to proceed with the purchase.

Heather Redfern, director of the Vancouver Eastside Cultural Centre that would run the new theatre, applauded the move.

Redfern described the theatre as “the perfect place” — an ideal, mid-sized venue that would provide affordable space for small projections and art showings in a city where theatre space of any kind is at a premium.

cmontgomery@theprovince.com

Time is running out for those keen to save the York Theatre

The York Theatre on Commercial Drive once home to Vancouver Little Theatre Society – Photo – Dan Toulgoet

If city council doesn’t get behind a campaign to save the building that was most recently the Raja Cinema, it could be demolished within four months, says Tom Durrie.

That’s why Durrie, founder of the Save the York Theatre Task Force and former manager of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, is arranging meetings with individual councillors. Tom Durrie heads up the task force that hopes to save the York Theatre, more recently known as the Raja Cinema, which was built in 1913.

The group is urging citizens to send letters of support for the retention of the theatre to city council. It’s also seeking “bridge funding”–most likely, money from an individual to buy the building, which in October sold for $960,000–and is developing business and fundraising plans.

“The property will either be bought back from them by the society [task force] or else, if that all falls apart, they can simply resell it, probably at a profit,” Durrie said. “So it’s a matter of putting up money. It’s not really a risk.”

Members of the task force working to save the theatre at Commercial Drive, just north of Venables, met with Paul Phillips, president of Vintage Development Corp., one of the owners of the building, and with city planning, cultural affairs and heritage staff in December.

Durrie said Rob Jenkins, a city planner, mentioned the possibility of the city finding an alternative site for the developer to build townhouses.

“Unfortunately, when [the developer] first made his inquiries at city hall it was during the strike and he was told there was no interest in the theatre whatsoever,” Durrie said. “It’s unfortunate. I’m sure he would have had second thoughts otherwise, because there may well be delays in proceeding with this application.”

Jenkins said the task force raised the idea of an alternative site. He said the city is working on a cultural facilities study and is unable to respond to individual requests for capital funding at this time. He said finding an alternative site is unlikely, but the city is looking into it.

Phillips, also president of and designer for EDG Homes Inc., expects to file a development application with the city in the next two weeks. Such applications typically take four months to be processed. Once that’s done, a demolition permit could be issued.

“As time goes by we’re less inclined to sell it because we have more invested, obviously, in terms of time and energy,” Phillips said.

Durrie first founded a group to save the theatre when demolition was proposed in 1981. Although the building remained intact, the city said the York was culturally insignificant. It’s not on the city’s heritage register. But now the city is looking beyond architectural significance to consider its cultural and historical value, he said.

Durrie said John McCarter, who later helped designed the historic Marine Building downtown, designed the York. The 475-seat theatre is plain inside, but in good shape.

“It was built in 1913, just at the time when this part of town, the Grandview area, was beginning to develop. The tram lines were put in at that point and so a lot of rising middle class people built houses out here,” Durrie said. “At the time when they built it, they sort of envisioned this as being the cultural centre of Vancouver, and it still could be.”

Townhouses planned for York site The new owners of the York Theatre on Commercial Drive plan to replace the theatre with eco-friendly townhouses.

Paul Phillips, president of EDG Homes Inc., which purchased the property last October as Vintage Development Corp. with business partners Small Favours Pictures Limited and 0805122 BC Limited, told the Straight he is not interested in preserving the theatre.

“Our interest is to develop an environmentally sensitive, LEED-certified townhome development there—a cutting-edge property in line with the EcoDensity of [Vancouver mayor] Mr. Sullivan’s dreams,” he said by phone. “It will be townhomes with attached garages, with roof gardens and low-toxicity materials.”

Phillips said he and his partners will submit their plans to the city within the next week or two, and expect development to begin in May or June this year.

Members of Vancouver’s arts community, led by Tom Durrie, the former general manager of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, have been campaigning to save the York Theatre since last fall. They now hope to find a way to purchase the property from the developers. “The idea is to buy time,” Durrie said.

Roger Chilton, chair of the Downtown Vancouver Association’s arts and culture committee and part of the campaign to save the theatre, told the Straight he’s confident someone will step forward with the necessary funds.

“Whoever ties up the capital wouldn’t lose money,” Chilton said, “but they’d make a huge contribution to the community holding their capital in this investment, which they could always resell.”

Phillips is not completely averse to the idea of selling his recently acquired property. “We’re businessmen and the property’s always for sale, I guess, at the right price,” he said.

The new owner of the York Theatre on Commercial Drive is set for a face-to-face meeting with advocates of the venue’s preservation on Thursday morning (December 3) at Vancouver City Hall, under the auspices of the city’s planning department.

According to Tom Durrie, former general manager of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra and leader of a campaign to save the York Theatre from demolition, the new owner of the property is Paul Phillips of EDG Homes Inc. Durrie said he has rounded up a group for the meeting, including the Vancouver East Cultural Centre’s executive director, Heather Redfern; architect David Galpin of Downs/Archambault & Partners; and Philip Boname, president of development planning firm Urbanics Consultants Ltd. “I think we have at least accomplished getting the whole thing on the city’s agenda,” Durrie told the Straight.

James Boldt, heritage planner with the city, explained to the Straight that the theatre appears to meet the requirements for heritage status. “Our feeling is that it would be eligible for the register, but it hasn’t been fully reviewed yet,” he said. “At this stage we’re just trying to bring some parties together and start looking at options involving retention of the theatre.”

Durrie said he was optimistic about the meeting, but that “if the developer is determined to go ahead and going to plan for demolition, then I say ‘Look out,’ because there are an awful lot of people who are interested in seeing this theatre survive and be redeveloped as it should be.”

Recently, some of the region’s most historic buildings have fallen victim to the wrecker, smashing to dust an irreplaceable part of a city’s soul. Is there any way to save the remaining architectural masterpieces?

It was downtown Vancouver’s last building that could remind us of the 1930s – a whirling wedding cake of streamline stucco that most of us knew as the Fido outlet at Georgia and Richards, first built as the Collier Auto Showroom. It got knocked down early one morning during the civic strike, leaving one more empty-tooth slot in the mug’s face of downtown.

Then, on Dec. 6, the wrecking crews went to work on one of Arthur Erickson’s most world-renowned and influential houses, a grand sequence of portals and frames elegantly descending down a Horseshoe Bay cliffside. This 1963 house for David Graham was featured on the pages of Life magazine and leased as a love nest to Warren Beatty and Julie Christie when in town to shoot Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

West Vancouver resident Barry Downs, one of British Columbia’s most-respected house architects and authors, says “the Graham House was Arthur Erickson’s Fallingwater” – a reference to Frank Lloyd Wright’s career-reviving, rural Pennsylvania concrete and brick house, which similarly cascades over rocks down a hill.

The Georgia Street Collier/Fido showroom was a vision in white from when modernism was new, and the West Vancouver Graham House was the evolution of these same ideas of seeing architecture afresh, but tempered to our climate, our building materials, and West Coast lifestyles.

Someone broke the law, surely, when these two got whacked?

Alas, no.

These losses draw attention to the weakness of British Columbia’s heritage legislation, as neither building had meaningful legal protection, and their owners needed almost nothing except a perfunctory demolition permit to excise these two crucial visual reminders of how we lived in the 20th century. Heritage advocates worry that the loss of these high-profile downtown Vancouver and West Vancouver buildings will clear the way for an end-of-the-building-boom destruction frenzy for many more, a kind of demolition derby.

Herb Stovel – head of heritage studies at Carleton University and one of Canada’s leading preservationists – says B.C. heritage legislation and programs are strong in the soft strategies of convincing and cajoling owners to preserve our history, but weak on legal guarantees to prevent demolitions like these. Prof. Stovel says B.C. is having some success with the “nurture and support” of conservation efforts, but cautions, “Governments need to preserve and protect buildings, too.” He notes that heritage-protection efforts are significantly blunted by a clause in B.C. heritage legislation requiring public compensation if designation reduces potential private redevelopment profits.

Heritage designation – or as the Americans call it, the “landmarking” of private buildings without owner’s approval – is commonplace in the don’t-tread-on-me capitalist United States, and a crucial historic preservation tool in every other nation of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

American preservation efforts are powered by the private sector, in large part because of tax incentives instituted under former president Ronald Reagan. With this public intervention into private real-estate markets in the name of preserving Mom-and-Apple-Pie America, maybe the Harper government will come to realize it can please Bonspiel and Tim Hortons Canada through similar tax changes here (starting with the brewing controversy over an entirely non-elitist construction, Kingsway’s 2400 Court Motel.)

Canada’s federal historic-sites protection for private buildings is even weaker than our provincial laws, in large part because of resistance to our central government asserting powers over heritage. Heritage preservation straddles land use and cultural concerns, and federal activism is seen to threaten entrenched constitutional rights of the provinces, especially Quebec. Federal political systems, however, have not stopped Australia and Germany from implementing strong heritage programs at both national and state levels.

B.C.’s weak heritage legislation is the legacy of both Socred/Liberal and NDP governments, right and left both eschewing perceptions of cultural elitism in preserving our best buildings at the cost of private development rights. Consequently, we all lose a common good – a sense of our own past. With every demolition, Metro Vancouver comes closer to status as a muscular and aggressive zombie-town, with no brain and no heart.

At both municipal and provincial levels, heritage efforts are understaffed and underfunded, with most current efforts devoted to research on sites and creative advice to owners and developers, backed up with modest grants (available to designated properties only) for their upkeep and occasional restoration. This means many micro successes – the replacement of rotting eave ornaments on many Edwardian former doctors’ residences, for example – but a few macro failures, such as the recent demolitions, and those which are likely to follow in the current regulatory climate.

At a level below official designation is the largely honorific category of heritage registers – West Vancouver’s is currently being compiled, while Vancouver’s is being updated – which are listings of potential heritage sites. Heritage registers are useful tools for heritage and urban planners to flag properties, so the soft arts of persuasion can be applied in the context of other land-use approvals. Some B.C. municipalities require the approval of owners even to be listed on their heritage registers, which seems to me the architectural equivalent of asking words if they want to be in the dictionary.

The District of West Vancouver debated adding the Graham residence to its draft heritage register shortly before it came down, but was reluctant to do so without the support of owner Shiraz Lalji, and everyone involved knew this would be symbolic, not actual protection. West Vancouver city planners and politicians did everything they could to hang on to the Erickson masterpiece, but in the context of current provincial legislation and funding programs, they had no arrows in their quiver; when it comes to heritage preservation, the province owns the whole armoury.

Soft strategies of moral suasion have had some success, notably the campaign led by Arthur Erickson Conservancy founder Cheryl Cooper to protect his Evergreen Building on West Pender. But crucial to this soft success, says Ms. Cooper, was some hard cash, in the form of valuable Transfer of Development Rights, which can be bought, then moved to another piece of downtown.

But even this device is not available today, as earlier this year Vancouver city council placed a moratorium on the issuance of new TDR agreements, while it examines the large stock of existing credits yet to be plunked down on a downtown peninsula already subject to hyper-development. Vancouver is the only municipality in British Columbia that has developed a density bank system, and incentives like these only work in building-hungry boom times, seemingly about to end.

With the Graham house now gone, preservationists’ worries have moved on to two even more important West Vancouver residences – houses-cum-painting studios with important gardens for artists B. C. Binning and Thomas Gordon Smith.

The self-designed 1942 Binning house – a National Historic site, and arguably the first residence in Canada entirely shaped by the European Modern Movement – was thought to be safe when Jessie Binning’s will stated a first preference to donate the house and garden for permanent use as a scholar’s residence or house-museum preserving the pioneering works of her predeceased husband.

But according to one of her will’s executors and former Erickson partner Geoff Massey, there has been no luck in convincing the likes of the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University or Emily Carr College of Art and Design to take on stewardship of this modest but sublime nexus of art and architecture. “If there was a half million dollars on the table, it could be done,” said Mr. Massey of the funds needed to endow repairs and property taxes, “otherwise, it is going.”

Similarly, and somewhat unbelievably, there is no heritage designation protection or conservation plan in place for the 1964 house designed by Arthur Erickson for Marion and Thomas Gordon Smith, recently named by his architectural peers as one of the top five buildings constructed in Canada in the entire 20th century.

The Smiths still live there, and unlike the willful decline of the Graham property, it has never looked better. However, the Smiths have talked of willing the house and garden to the Vancouver Art Gallery. With VAG’s announcement of their planned construction of what could end up being a quarter-billion-dollar new gallery building, there will be strong pressure to extract the maximum benefit out of the property – by demolishing the house or building on its integral garden.

I know and have chatted with all of our remaining stalwarts of heroic modernism, most well into their 80s: Erickson, Massey and Downs as architects, and the Smiths and the late Jessie Binning as clients. There is often a sheepish tone of resignation in their voices, as if it was inevitable that these markers of their lives and times will be destroyed, the self-consuming monster of modernism moving on to new challenges. These sentiments are understandable, but the duty to preserve these and similar buildings is not for those who made them, but for all of us.

Like many people his age, 83-year-old Arthur Erickson has good days, and he has bad days. I talked to him in both modes recently, and there is one strong word he voiced both times about the demise of the Graham house: “Tragic.”

For Vancouver artists, an Olympic challenge with the games just over two years away, the city is facing a stark shortage of venues to show off Canadian culture

At a recent event at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, respected former Vancouver city planner Larry Beasley informed the audience that, while the city may be world-renowned for its urban planning, it has almost no international cultural reputation. “Honestly, we are not even on the charts in terms of the growth and support of our cultural institutions,” he told the crowd. “[It's] an issue I think we are far behind on.”

He won’t get much argument there – even if the idea is embarrassing for the local arts community. In a city known for its mountains, ocean and breathtaking views, cultural institutions are fighting to get on the map.

That fight has taken on new desperation as the 2010 Olympics approach. “We are going to be all over the world’s radar,” says Tanja Dixon-Warren, president of the Greater Vancouver Professional Theatre Alliance. “We should be taking advantage of that and showing off.”

But “showing off” requires something the Vancouver arts scene doesn’t have: space. All over the city, arts groups are outgrowing their homes. “As the city gets bigger, you automatically get more artists coming to the city,” says Dixon-Warren, who is also a theatre producer. “As a result, you need more spaces. That’s just math.”

The problem is particularly acute in the theatre community. Beyond the construction of a new 100-seat studio theatre at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, where Beasley made his frank remarks, there isn’t much good news these days for the more than 100 production companies in the city looking for space to put on their shows.

Dixon-Warren has been personally navigating the underequipped theatre scene for years. She has built sets in her garage (most recently for Angels in America) and lost money on productions she was forced to run in non-theatrical venues – because those venues didn’t come with chairs or washroom supplies, which she was forced to furnish herself.

Last week, Dixon-Warren was among the speakers who gathered downtown at the Vogue Theatre (a 1940 art-deco classic that has been dark for almost for two years) to launch a “call to action.” Hosted by Heritage Vancouver, a non-profit advocacy group for heritage conservation, the event focused mainly on efforts to save historical theatres from the wrecking ball.

The crux of their argument is this: It doesn’t make sense that, while theatre companies are struggling to find performance and even rehearsal space, several historical theatres in the city remain dark.

Take the York Theatre. Tom Durrie, a passionate theatre lover who spoke at the Vogue forum, has been fighting since 1981, on and off, to restore the York.

The theatre, on the city’s east side, opened in 1913. Most recently, it was known as the Raja Cinema, and showed Bollywood films. It closed last year, and the building was put on the market. “When it came up for sale,” recalls Durrie, “I thought, ‘My golly, now’s the time to act.’ ”

For a year, he tried to raise enough money to buy the theatre (the asking price was about $950,000, but renovations would likely cost around $10-million). But the day after the forum, Durrie received crushing news: The theatre had been sold. In an e-mail sent to members of the Vancouver theatre community titled “Too Late!” Durrie wrote that “unless [the buyer] has philanthropic intentions, we can say goodbye to one of the finest and most historic theatres in Vancouver.”

The news comes on the heels of the demolition of another old east-side Vancouver theatre. The Imperial on Main Street opened in 1912, but had fallen far from its former vaudevillian grandeur, operating for the last 20 years or so as a pornographic theatre called the Venus. For the last few weeks, crews have been dismantling the theatre and excavating the site.Condos will take the theatre’s place.

There is some optimism, though, about a major effort under way to save another historic theatre in a spot that seems unlikely to attract condominium developers.

The Pantages is smack in the heart of Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside. A group interested in revitalizing the troubled area has been working diligently to restore and reopen the theatre. It’s promising a big announcement on January 6, 2008 – the 100th anniversary of the Pantages’s opening.

As for the Vogue, its current owner wants to tear out the seats and replace them with tables and booths, and turn the place into a supper club featuring musical performances, guest speakers and – maybe – some theatre. He’s in the process of applying for a liquor licence.

Properly restoring any of these old theatres would cost millions. But at last week’s forum, Don Luxton of Heritage Vancouver put it in perspective: If people think it’s expensive to buy and renovate a theatre like the Vogue, he said, “try building a new one.”

In fact, people have tried. In the early 1990s, the city and province announced with great fanfare a new theatre complex in one of the city’s prime real-estate areas. The Coal Harbour Arts Complex was to include two theatres – a 1,500-seat lyric hall and a 350-seat studio theatre to be used primarily, but not exclusively, for music. But those plans fell apart when the provincial government decided to expand the Vancouver convention centre onto the waterfront site instead. (The city and province are holding almost $20-million earmarked for the arts complex, with the next steps to be announced by year’s end.)

The lack of musical-performance spaces has never been as evident as in recent weeks, during the civic strike. The dispute affected the 2,800-seat Orpheum, and such organizations as the Vancouver Recital Society and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra found themselves with few or no options for alternative venues.

For musical performances targeting smaller audiences, meanwhile, it is almost impossible to find an appropriate space. Those types of concerts generally end up in a church.

As for theatre, the size of needed space varies, depending on whom you talk to. Dixon-Warren says the city desperately needs more small theatres, in the 60-to-300-seat range. Durrie says a dearth of 500-seat theatres (about the size of the York) is the big problem. And at last week’s event, Luxton mused that it’s theatres about the size of the Vogue, with 1,100 seats, that the city could really use most.

The turnout at the Heritage Vancouver forum was hardly spectacular, with only 50 or so theatre types in attendance. However, there were a few suggestions that came from it: talk of creating a fund that would require developers to contribute to cultural infrastructure; a voluntary theatre-improvement fee, through which patrons could donate money at the same time they buy tickets; and involving sports personalities in the drive to save theatres.

Durrie suggested the group take a (recycled) page out of the environmental movement’s handbook. “Maybe,” he mused, “we have to chain ourselves to theatres.”

The suggestion came too late for his York Theatre – and for the Imperial, whose demolition progressed on the very day the save-Vancouver’s-historic-theatres forum was held.

Still, there is some good news coming for Vancouver’s cultural growth. The Vancouver Art Gallery – which has outgrown its current site, an old provincial courthouse on Robson Street – is about to announce details of a much-anticipated move to a new space.

The new facility will more than double the gallery’s size to 300,000 square feet (about 28,000 square metres) and will likely be in the city’s planned “cultural precinct” – the heart of which will be in what was once a bus depot (currently a parking lot) next to the city-run Queen Elizabeth Theatre (and also the planned site of one of two live stages which will operate during the 2010 Olympics). The VAG will make its announcement in the next few weeks.

But with only two years and four months to go before the 2010 Games, it seems unlikely there will be many shiny new buildings or tangible cultural change in time for the arrival of the Olympic flame – and the world’s gaze. “I do think we need to look at [solutions now],” says Dixon-Warren. “If we go away with a reputation of being a dud, it would be a big bummer.”