Putting the fun back in No Fun City (aka Vancouver)
STEPHEN QUINN | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Feb. 04, 2011 6:12PM EST
The issue was probably best summed up by former Vancouver city councillor Jim Green a few years ago in a conversation with the operator of the Cottage Bistro on Main Street.
“So you can have two mimes but not three?”
Such was the state of live music and performance venues in Vancouver. Art strangled by frequently nonsensical regulation. It’s how we got to be No Fun City.
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Many years later, coincidentally in an election year, the city is finally trying to shake that nickname.
This week, council passed a series of recommendations that will allow more live music and performance to take place in more venues.
In this, the first phase of a multiyear plan, venue capacity could be increased, performances could be allowed to take place in less traditional venues like artists’ studios or warehouses, and people might even be allowed to have a drink in some of these places. Legally.
But contained in the recommendations is a small nugget that may have gone unnoticed. It is a provision written in classic city-report-speak: “That the city explore a mechanism for purchasers [of new condos] to acknowledge potential impacts of neighbouring live performance venues.”
In plain English: You moved in beside a heavy metal bar. Guess what? There’s going to be some noise. Get over it. You live in the city. Now sign here.
This could be a hard sell in a city where condo-dwellers are unwilling to live next door to dying people, who tend not to party very loudly. Okay, different issue.
But people who have just moved into a new building that happens to be near a bar or nightclub that predates their own tenure by several decades have effected change in the past.
The closure of the Cobalt on Main Street in 2009 has been blamed largely on the complaints of new condo residents who moved in long after the bar had established its reputation as a haven for lovers of punk and metal.
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