New Westminster’s heritage buildings face modern challenges

New Westminster’s Columbia Street is dotted with antique shops, vacated storefronts and heritage facades.

The street was a once-busy hub for the former capital of British Columbia, centred around the vaudeville-style Columbia Theatre, later known as the Burr Theatre in honour of New Westminster-born actor Raymond Burr. The theatre was best known for its floor-to-ceiling atmospheric mural painted by William MacInnis, the artist who painted the gold-leaf detail in the dining room of the unsinkable Titanic.

In its prime, Columbia Street boasted the Burr Theatre, the Paramount Theatre and the Carter McNairn building, all architectural icons of the city’s love of culture and heritage.

Now, after a two-year-long battle between the city and the New Westminster Heritage Preservation Society (NWHPS), the heritage Burr Theatre is closed and up for sale. The once cinematic Paramount has become a “gentleman’s club,” and the Carter McNairn building has been demolished to make way for a Safeway. There’s a threat that the Massey Theatre could be added to the city’s list of heritage casualties.

Plans for a new multi-purpose civic centre have residents and culture enthusiasts asking if the new facility will make up for what the city has lost. The new centre would be located on Columbia Street, between 8th Street and Begbie Street, opening in 2012.

“Heritage is so important to New Westminster because it’s our identity,” said NWHPS president Maureen Arvantidis. Catherine Hutson, also on the board of directors for the NWHPS, can’t understand why the city couldn’t save the Burr instead.

“The city is getting $35 million from the casinos to build a new civic centre when we could [have restored] the Burr for the same functions,” said Hutson, explaining that the centre’s preliminary designs includes theatre facilities.

The Massey Theatre, a 60-year-old proscenium-style auditorium, faced a threat from the city and the New Westminster school district, which had residents in a panic. The threat prompted a “public outcry,” according to the executive director of the theatre, Jessica Schneider, as well as a petition, a support group and website, savethemasseytheatre.blogspot.com.

The future of the Massey Theatre is still unclear, but Schneider isn’t worried about losing the theatre anymore.

According to her, the school district conducted a report on the theatre making it seem as though it needed seismic upgrades that weren’t worth the money. She said the school district’s motive was to scoop-up the theatre’s property to expand a high school, but she and the city now know that what the report suggested is not true.

“We don’t urgently need upgrades,” said Schneider. “We need upgrades like all buildings need upgrades.”

Schneider believe the school district was issuing threats to both the theatre and the city. “The school district was trying to get the city to swap the theatre with the [rest of their property], and they kind of put out the threat like, ‘We’ll just build on the theatre site unless someone gives us something else to work with.’ It’s a very political hot potato,” she said. “The [actual] issue is that because New Westminster is the oldest, first part of Metro Vancouver, it’s completely built from one edge to the other. There’s no space left to expand as density increases. This is just the beginning of an issue that’s going to face everybody eventually.”

Unlike the NWHPS, Schneider said that keeping the Massey Theatre alive doesn’t make the multi-purpose civic centre obsolete. Neither does Andree St. Martin, executive director of the New Westminster Arts Council.

“Of course, we are supporting that the Massey would stay,” said St. Martin. “It’s the only arts-focused facility in the city [but] arts will happen whether there’s facilities or not, artists will do their art whether they get paid or not.”

According to Schneider and St. Martin, the goal is to have as many facilities as possible.

“There’s a lack of arts facilities in the city, but there’s certainly not a lack of arts in the city,” said St. Martin. “We’re very hopeful [that] there will be a strong arts presence in the new facility they’re going to build.”

“We need [the civic centre] and so much more,” added Schneider. “We need as many cultural spaces as possible.”

Guided by the invisible hand of design: Signage tells commuters more than just destination

Ken Hughes can’t stand it when British street signs aren’t there to do their job.

“Sometimes you’ll come around this traffic circle, looking for the sign that’s always there and there isn’t one. And you go, ‘You bastards! Why did you do that to me?’”

An English expatriate who teaches graphic design at Kwantlen’s Richmond campus, Hughes has an intimate understanding of how important road signs are to modern transportation.

Over the past 10 years, Hughes has been studying signage by photographing lettering inscribed in stone, painted on walls and printed on signs in various places during his travels in Europe.

He knows that street signs, or “wayfinding graphics” in the graphic-design world, have meaning beyond just telling you where to go.

“[Road] signage makes…you feel like you’re being looked after,” said Hughes. “It’s almost like there’s an invisible human being saying, ‘If you want to go to Scotland from London, just follow the signs; you’ll get there. Just follow the signs. Have faith.’”

Street signs, or “directional signs” to City of Vancouver engineers, aren’t celebrated like parks or bike lanes, but are considered a valuable and constantly evolving community service by those who work with them.

Street-name blades, the smaller signs attached to posts on street corners that tell you you’re at Hastings and Victoria, have changed in type size and reflectivity in recent years, enabling safer travel through the city, said Winston Chau, a transportation engineer for Vancouver.

The Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) dictates the overall design of signs in Vancouver, ensuring they conform to a standard: white, sans-serif lettering on black background, bordered by high-grade reflective tape.

Despite TAC’s guidelines, some Vancouver communities have reclaimed their signs and used them to express unique cultural identities.

Business-improvement associations in some of Vancouver’s popular neighbourhood districts have applied to the city to have their blades designed to represent their neighbourhood’s distinct cultural identity, said Chau.

Signs with Chinese characters and a distinct 1940s style distinguish Vancouver’s Chinatown, and signs for the Marpole area near South-West Marine Drive are printed in the language and symbols of the Musquem first nation, who historically inhabited the area. The newly refurbished Cambie Village, the Punjabi market at Main Street and 49th Avenue and posh Kerrisdale have also customized their street-sign blades to express character or historical importance.

All Vancouver street-signs, including pesky regulatory signs telling you where not to park downtown, are printed in the city’s sign shop, located at the National Works Yard just behind Pacific Central Station. Responsible for producing everything from venue signs to traffic redirection signs during the Olympics, the shop is shouldering its fair share of work for the games.

In the little spare time employees have, the shop also prints individual signs for people as part of their Street Signs for Everyone program. People can order plastic or metal signs, ranging in price from $50 to $90, featuring the names of any Vancouver street.

Nick Kazawa, an engineering department employee responsible for managing the shop, said that tourists and locals used to order replica signs of favorite Vancouver destinations such as Robson Street.

These days, however, people are more interested in having their own names printed on the signs.

Hughes said that these sorts of personal affiliations with street signs, and the cultural pride expressed by Vancouver’s custom neighbourhood signs, are evidence that people want street signs to be more than plain infrastructure.

Some designers, such as England’s Why Not Associates, are attempting to embed street signs into walls and sidewalks instead of littering the landscape with more poles, shapes and junk to look at, said Hughes.

Along with wayfinding information, the group is integrating historical information about the people and cities where the signage is based.

“It’s not just telling you where things are, but it’s telling you about what’s there. To me that is developing a sense of civic pride and knowledge of your district,” said Hughes.

“Especially if you’re younger…sometimes we’re so caught up in working on newer technologies that the history of a place escapes us,” said Hughes.
”Picking up information on where you live, just because you have to see it everyday walking down the street…to me, that’s a great idea.”

A changing game: Digital technology has changed our musical lives

In his 10-year run as general manager of Zulu Records, Nic Bragg has seen his customers’ connection to music transformed drastically during the revolution brought on by MP3s and the Internet.

“It doesn’t really have a value anymore,” Bragg said. “The relationship has changed. Your music tastes are constantly evolving and you’re constantly consuming, as well as purging music.”

The devaluation of music has been encouraged by the transition of traditional music journalism into the online forum, Bragg said. He said that taste-making websites like Pitchfork.com have encouraged lifestyle branding of artists.

“I went to Chicago to their [Pitchfork’s] music festival and basically, it’s like a Wal-Mart of independent culture. Shoe companies and other companies are paying to be at the festival to market to the demographic,” he said.

Bragg is skeptical about Pitchfork’s willingness to turn music fans into customers for corporate wares, a common practice in commercial culture, but guarded against in grassroots music circles. Most of them that is.

On the other side of Vancouver, Edo Van Breeman, owner of label Unfamiliar Records, is ecstatic about Pitchfork’s marketing power.

Unfamiliar Records is the Canadian home of Pitchfork favourites Japandroids. Last year, Van Breeman sent Pitchfork a press release for the punk band’s debut album, Post-Nothing. The album was immediately given the prestigious Best New Music title, the site’s gold seal of approval. Overnight success ensued.

“You could attribute, at least preliminarily, 100 per cent of their success to that review,” said Van Breeman. “Pitchfork is a unique case. They’re like the online, modern Rolling Stone.”

Although Van Breeman believes that Pitchfork’s support was pivotal to Japandroids’ success, he also thinks that if the band hadn’t gone on the road to meet fans and tour as much as it did afterwards, it wouldn’t have done so well.

“You also have a lot of best-new-music designations that don’t do as well as Japandroids. I think that has a lot to do with how the band has toured and how the band is marketed. It’s not like you get the review and bingo, you’re a big band. You have to work for it as well,” Van Breeman said.

Bragg concedes that around 2006, when Zulu Records started to see a decline in sales because of music pirating and online sales, a renaissance in live music began. As musicians could count less and less on traditional income from the sales of LPs and CDs, they hit the road to deliver their art in person and revive the relationship between bands and their fans.

Speaking to BBC News in 2007, Stuart Galbraith, the UK managing director of LiveNation (one of the biggest concert promotion companies in the UK and North America), said that the sales of festival tickets in the UK were surging “beyond belief,” and that the live music scene in the UK was doing better than he could ever remember.

“Live music is the ultimate experience,” Galbraith told the BBC. “It’s not bootleggable, you can’t replicate it, you can’t steal it, and you can’t mimic that experience of actually standing at a gig the roar of the crowd, the smell of the greasepaint.”

Vancouver blogger Quinn Omori would agree: he would even take it one step further. A UBC IT technician by day, Omori runs From Blown Speakers, a modest blog that presents an exhaustive list of nearly every show going on in Vancouver.

He believes that the amount of music available online hasn’t lessened the value of music for fans, but has allowed people to find music that inspires them to make music themselves, perhaps the most intimate relationship one can have with music.

“Anything you can possibly think of, anything that you might want to hear or want to emulate, you can find,” Omori said. “And you can probably find a bunch of people wanting to do the same thing.”

Back at Zulu records, Bragg and his coworkers are still managing to get by. Pitchforkapproved artists, Canadian independent music and timeless favorites like Zeppelin and Hendrix still sell, and vinyl is making a moderate comeback among the hipster set.

Bragg said that Zulu could expand into literature and video games, the way HMV has in recent years, but he thinks the chemistry is good enough for now.

“It’s a specialized thing now. The things that you’re looking for here, you can’t find in every corner store. The record store could become pretty much like Urban Outfitters if it really wanted to, but we’re not interested in that.”

Outdoor cinema a breath of fresh air

Barb Floden has helped to create a monster, one that emerges at night in summer and is adored in communities throughout Metro Vancouver.

For the last five years, the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation communications director has organized the Monsters in the Meadow film events, a series of free public movies screened outdoors at Ceperly Meadow, located close to Second Beach in Stanley Park.

The annual event brings hundreds of people out to watch classic B-rated monster movies in the ominous surroundings after dark.

This year, Monsters in the Meadow screened The Blob, the morbid tale of an alien life form that eats everything that gets in its way.

Floden said that despite some rain, more than 500 people showed up with blankets, popcorn and costumes to take in a bit of old-fashioned, drivein-inspired fun.

She said that event provides a great opportunity for people to come out for some affordable fun that isn’t the usual programming offered by the park board.

“Recreation is not just sports or fitness oriented,” she explained. “It’s anything to do with engaging people at the community level and bringing them together in a positive way, and arts and culture is also part of our mandate. And this is not the traditional public art and crafts and painting.”

Since Monsters in the Meadow began in 2004, localities throughout the Lower Mainland have promoted similar free movie screenings.

With the help of Fresh Air Cinemas, an events promotion and logistics company, White Rock, Langley, Burnaby and Coquitlam all hosted public movie screenings this past summer. The cities provide the right park
or accessible space and Fresh Air comes in and sets up sound, projection and a huge inflatable screen for viewing.

Floden acknowledged that sponsorship and support for free movie events like these come from many sources, and the public support is obviously there.

She said that the West End Community Association’s showing of Momma Mia at Harbor Green Park brought out more than 1,000 people.

In Surrey, free movie events have taken on a life of their own over the past five years.

Bonnie Burnside, manager of special events and communication for the Surrey Downtown Business Improvement Association, said that she has watched their annual summer movie events grow from a small get together near the Gateway SkyTrain station to a series of full-fledged community parties at Holland Park. Burnside said that this past summer, more than 2,000 people came out each night to see family films such as The Lion King and Hannah Montana: The Movie.

Burnside said she thinks that the events fill a void in summer-events programs in Surrey and provide members of the diverse community with an opportunity to come out and meet their neighbours.

“In our area, there weren’t a lot of events going on in the summertime and there particularly wasn’t a lot of events going on in the evening,” said Burnside. “What we wanted to do was show everybody that this was a great place to come and be a part of an event.”

Public response to the films has been overwhelmingly positive, but Burnside said that it is a costly venture that comes with some strings attached.

This summer, Burnside was able to finance the Holland Park movie events, pre-show entertainment included, for about $23,000. However, she knows the cost for next year will be higher and that it will be difficult to come up with the extra funding from her budget.

In Vancouver, Floden’s concerns have less to do with funding and more to do with organization and legalities. Responsibility for advertising for the movies was shared between business associations, community associations and Fresh Air Cinema, which made it difficult to find out where and when the events were happening.

To make matters worse, she said that many community associations bought the wrong public-screening licenses, which prevented them from advertising the names of the films screened. She said that things will be organized differently next year.

“We’ll do a group marketing effort that can show people ‘here is all of the events happening in our parks this summer,’ because people don’t really care who sponsors them, they just want to go see a free movie,” said Floden with a laugh.

“They can come out and just hang out at the park with their friends and neighbours and don’t have to open their wallets at all.”

Health community ready for outbreak, but virus’s unpredictable nature could ruin plans

Although he sounds fatigued, Dr. James Lu’s voice can only be described as confident when he speaks about the state of the H1N1 outbreak in B.C.

“I think the current concern is making sure the population has the correct information in terms of the level of risk or severity of the pandemic at this point in time, as we understand it,” Lu, the medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health in Richmond, said in an interview with the Kwantlen Chronicle.

In its Sept. 22 website bulletin, the Ministry of Health Services reported that 48 B.C. residents had contracted the virus so far. Among those, 21 had been sent to intensive care units and six people with preexisting medical conditions had died from the illness.

Lu said the provincial and federal governments, in conjunction with the B.C. Centre for Disease Control and Vancouver Coastal Health, have followed the guidelines set out by the Public Health Agency of Canada in the B.C Pandemic Influenza Pre-paredness Plan.

Developed in 2005 by the B.C. Ministry of Health and the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, the 200-page document outlines the steps officials are to follow before, during and after a flu-pandemic outbreak, and is consistent with national and international pandemic preparedness protocol, according to the introduction.

Lu said that because of the plan, provincial health authorities were able to quickly and effectively track and monitor the outbreak of the virus, as well as educate the public about how to avoid getting sick. The current rates of death and sickness due to H1N1 in the Lower Mainland are comparable to those for the common flu.

“It’s quite reasonable,” he said of the impact of the H1N1 on B.C residents.

“It’s not any different from what we would expect from seasonal influenza. The sense we have right now is that the health-impact severity is similar to the seasonal flu instead of the 1918 Spanish flu that people are recalling. The majority of the cases are mild.”

The Spanish flu was a pandemic that killed over 20 million worldwide in 1918 and 1919.

Historians believe that during that pandemic, Vancouver had one of the highest rates of death of any North American city, when 795 of an estimated 4,890 infected people died, according to a June 12, 2009 Vancouver Sun article.

The H1N1 virus has made headlines around the world for being an aggressive flu strain that has killed as many as 3,486 people as of Sept. 18, according to the World Health Organization weekly H1N1 update.

However, Lu insisted that the strain isn’t as aggressive as he and his colleagues had initially thought it was.

“You probably have about 50,000 hospitalizations or so each year from the flu and you would probably would have 4,000 to 5,000 deaths a year from the flu in Canada. I think we’re doing something to help keep H1N1 in that range, but the virus also isn’t as virulent as we feared initially,” he said.

Even so, Lu is advising those who are concerned about contracting H1N1 to make an effort to get the H1N1 vaccine from their local health authorities as it becomes available locally.

According to Lu, the vaccine will gradually become available within the next week, as it is being produced in batches, and is prioritized for vulnerable B.C. populations.

Irene Lanzinger, president of the B.C. Teachers Federation, said that strategies for preventing the spread of flu among students – such as hand washing and covering coughs or sneezes – are being implemented by teachers and schools as students settle into classes.

However, Lanzinger also said that she doesn’t know of any specific plans or strategies put in place by provincial health authorities to protect students.

“The ministry of health and the ministry of education need to make sure that school boards are prepared for what might happen,” she said.

“I don’t know whether they have given instructions to school boards. We really get the sense that there is a little bit of a wait-and-see attitude out there because nobody knows for sure how bad it’s going to be. Having said that, people need to put some plans in place in case something does happen.”

Lu is optimistic that the H1N1 outbreak in B.C. won’t evolve into a greater crisis, but he is also realistic about the unpredictability of the virus as the flu season hits.

“Because most of us don’t have any immunity to it, I wouldn’t be surprised if come the fall, we do have a large number of people who become ill,” he said.

“Most of it will not need hospitalization or need to be seen by a doctor, but more people may become sick with the flu,” he said. “It may turn out that yes, this virus may be causing a little more severe illness in a healthy person, but it’s hard to sort that out now.”

H1N1 vaccine might be free for students

If H1N1 injections became available to Kwantlen students, they might be covered under the existing student health plan.

The Kwantlen Student Association is looking into the possibility of including H1N1 vaccines in student health benefits. The KSA has contacted Gallivan & Associates, Kwantlen’s health and dental insurance company, and hopes to negotiate the vaccine’s inclusion, should it become widely available.

“We’ve taken steps to make a change to the plan so that that cost would be at least partially or wholly covered by the KSA,” said KSA general manager Desmond Rodenbour.

If the H1N1 vaccine is added to the benefits, Kwantlen will direct students to vaccination clinics for the shot. Rodenbour said he hopes all full-time students on the medical plan would be eligible to receive the immunization.
Currently, the vaccine is still being developed and the KSA doesn’t have a projected cost

for the shot, but it’s expected to be generally available later in the fall. The Public Health Agency of Canada reports that the government intends to purchase 50.4 million doses of the vaccine, enough to cover the population of Canada.

Linda McCannell, a program leader in communicable disease for the Richmond Health Department, said she doesn’t think people in good health should be as concerned about getting infected as those who are illness-prone.

“From what I’ve seen, the severity [of H1N1] tends to be very similar to regular flu,” she said. “It’s pregnant women, it’s children two years of age, it’s people with chronic health problems and those are who we normally immunize for flu [who might have a more severe reaction].”

Janine Hadfield, a coordinator of the Kwantlen Wellness Centre, said the regular seasonal flu shots will be given on campus near the end of October or early November.

Last year, about 180 staff and students got flu shots on-campus, according to Eddie Lee of the Student Health Improvement Program.

Lee said the number of people getting the shot might increase because of the awareness of the flu virus.

Lee estimated the flu shot will cost $15 to $20, adding that the KSA will subsidize some of the cost for students on the health plan.

Kwantlen is promoting good hygiene, such as washing your hands and covering your mouth when you cough, as defences against the flu in general and H1N1 in particular. Automated hand-sanitizer stations have been installed at main entrances and updates about influenza are available on the Kwantlen website (www. kwantlen.ca/hr/ohs/h1n1.html).

“The primary thing is education,” said Peter Chevrier, Kwantlen’s director of marketing and communications. “If we educate everybody on some of the really fundamental, basic processes, you start to cut down on the likelihood of infection.”

According to Kwantlen’s Influenza Exposure Control Plan, the Emergency Management Committee would issue a health notice in the event of a major flu epidemic.

Students should be concerned if they have a fever above 38 C and any other H1N1 symptom such as cough or shortness of breath. Suspected and confirmed cases should be reported immediately to Healthlink BC at 8-1-1 and the manager of Kwantlen’s Occupational Health & Safety Office at (604) 599-2924.

Much of the Influenza Exposure Control Plan is about precautions to stop the spread before it starts.

Local and regional health authorities would decide if school closures are needed. Kwantlen, however, is not restricted from implementing its own preventive measures, said Chevrier.

“We have a lot of freedom to do what we feel is the best in order to provide a level of commitment to the health and safety of our students,” he said.

He added that the janitorial crews have been trained for more thorough and frequent decontamination, such as sanitizing doorknobs and handrails.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has reported five cases of H1N1 in B.C. There are no reports of H1N1 affecting anyone at Kwantlen.

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