The Arbutus Ridge community will soon be mourning the loss of two of its members.
Plans to tear down Varsity Bowling and the Ridge Theatre were approved by the City of Vancouvers development permit board on Oct. 22. Replacing the lanes and the theatre will be a four-storey commercial and condo development.
Its my life, says Ken Hayden, who has owned Varsity Bowling since 1981. Ive been in the business since 1976. I know a lot of people who have been bowling here since 81 I have third generations coming in.
Hayden takes a long pause.
So you can imagine how that is. Its just the best thing in the world and now its going to be the worst thing in the world.
Not only do they provide entertainment for the area (it is estimated that about 700 people use the lanes as league bowlers), the bowling alley and theatre are active members of their community, helping their neighbours and other groups.
Dozens of those community members had marched on City Hall earlier in October to try to save the bowling lanes.
Leonard Schein, operator of the Ridge Theatre is sad, but realistic, about this change.
I feel very sad because I have a 34-year history with it, says Schein who is also with Festival Cinemas, but single-screen theatres are very difficult to operate with the huge property taxes and utilities and people arent attending single-screen theatres like they used to with all of these multiplex theatres.
Councillor Adriane Carr thinks that this is a big loss for the community.
The Ridge Theatre and the Varsity bowling alley are well-loved and are community icons, Carr says. Its not that people just use them and admire them from afar, they use them. They are the heart of that residential community.
So what happens when the community loses its heart?
I think that any time you lose a theatre in the community, you lose jobs for high school students and college students who live in that area, says Schein. You increase the number of people taking their cars to go farther away to see a movie. Also, theatres like the Ridge do a lot of benefits, free showings for charities were in the midst of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival. So those charities getting money from the neighbourhood theatre and bowling alleys wont be getting those donations, that support anymore. Its the same for neighbourhood soccer teams, softball teams, and daycare centres.
Hani Lammam, vice-president of development and acquisitions for Cressey Development, the condo developer, says this is simply an issue of economics.
Obviously we are not theatre operators and were not bowling alley operators, were developers, Lammam says. So we decided it was a building that reached the end of its economic life and its not good business to reinvest and try to maintain a building that is at the end of its life. There is a lot of vacancy and it appears that it cant support more businesses.
And while the current building may not make business sense, the theatre and bowling alley seem to make sense in other ways.
The feeling is terrible, says Hayden, who would like to work with the parks department on a new city-owned bowling alley for the West Side. To give you an example, one day one of our bowlers seemed to be distraught and my wife went over to try to console her this girl had special needs. So when Judy asked what the problem was, she told my wife she was crying because the bowling alley is going down. So that pretty much says it all.
No construction date has been set for the project.
