LANDMARKS
After celebrating its
75th anniversary last year, the venerable theatre may not last until its 76th
BY JOHN MACKIE VANCOUVER
SUN
The Hollywood
Theatre celebrated its 75th birthday last October. But the legendary Kitsilano
cinema may not be around for its 76th.
Owner David
Fairleigh has confirmed the Hollywood
will "probably" be closing. But he didn't say when, or what the family
plans to do with the property at 3123 West Broadway.
"I can't make
any comments at this time," said Fairleigh, 67, whose family has owned and
operated the 651-seat theatre since 1935. "I'm right in the middle of
something, I can't comment right now."
Alan Franey of the
Vancouver International Film Festival has been going to the Hollywood since he was a teenager. He thinks
Vancouverites will be "shocked" to learn that one of the city's
cultural icons may soon be gone.
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David Fairleigh and
son Vince inside Kitsilano's Hollywood Theatre.
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"It would be a
great loss to the neighbourhood, and our sense of what public spaces are for,
our historical memory of what they used to be for," said Franey. "It's a great facade, it's a great place
to see films. I think it's near and dear to a lot of our hearts."
The theatre has an
assessed value of $2.426 million, and is rumoured to be on the market for $2.9
million. At that price, said Leonard Schein of Festival Cinemas, "they're
asking too much to run it as a movie theatre."
Schein's company
leases two neighbourhood theatres, the Park and the Ridge. They may not be
around too much longer, either.
"The whole
shopping centre [the Ridge is in] has been put up for sale by our
landlord," Schein said. "If someone buys it he or she may decide to
tear down the whole shopping centre and build condos and other retail there,
but you never know until there's a new buyer. They may decide to hold the
location for years, or they may decide to redevelop it."
Don Luxton of
Heritage Vancouver said the city may have to step in if it wants to save the
city's dwindling number of neighbourhood theatres. Several old theatres have
been knocked down in recent years, including the Varsity, the Imperial (last
known as the Venus) and the Van East. The city's oldest theatre, the Pantages, has
also been condemned and may be torn down.
It would be a great
loss to the neighbourhood, and our sense of what public spaces are for, our
historical memory of what they used to be for.
ALAN FRANEY
"We have a
bigger, broader issue: that there's four theatres that are going to be problematic
and we could lose, the Hollywood , the Ridge,
the Park and the Dunbar ," said Luxton.
"Somebody at
the city should take a look and see which one of those would make good community
spaces. We're restoring the York
[theatre] on the east side. What about the west side? I think the Ridge, Park
and Hollywood
are all significant spaces, and ready to roll — you can use them as community
theatres, community space, performance space."
Luxton said one way
to save the theatres would be to bring back the heritage density transfer
system that the city killed in 2007. Another would be to buy the theatres with
the million the city collected 'from developers to build a Coal Harbour Arts
Complex, which never built. "Wouldn't it be sensible to buy a couple of
small neighbourhood theatres?" said Luxton.
"There's an
urgent issue here. The city should examine through its cultural services office
what would he the most appropriate use of the Coal Harbour Arts Complex money.
Could it be used in different parts of the city to purchase rind run these
smaller community centres, rather than concentrate everything downtown?"
Franey thinks the
potential loss of the Hollywood
might stir the "public recognition the space requires to be saved."
He also said the film festival would be interested in running the theatre, if
it could swing the financing.
"We have an
interest the Hollywood ,
for sure," said Franey. "We haven't used it for a few years, but this
is a very changing world, and I don't know if we can count on any of the
theatres we use being avail-able to us, one year to the next. It might not only
he something we'd like to consider, it's sonic-thing we may need to consider."
