This particular Facebook campaign sounds laudable - save the old Pantages Theatre, which began life as a vaudeville house over 100 years ago and saw such greats as Charlie Chaplin, Fred Allen, Stan Laurel (possibly as the Stan Jefferson Trio, before he was teamed with Oliver Hardy), Babe Ruth, and others. It later changed its name to the Avon, where it was the home to the Everyman Players, one of Vancouver's first professional theatre troupes (and where my parents first met). By the 60s, it had morphed into a Chinese movie house, first called the Sun Sing Theatre and then the Shaw, and for many years now, it's been boarded up and perpetually for sale or lease.
A civic minded group has been trying to take it over for quite a few years, trying to raise money and get City support to get it retrofitted and refurbished and restored to something of its former glory -- kind of like the work done on the Orpheum in times past. Now, it's become apparent that the City of Vancouver is not willing to spend money on the project, and the owners are looking to unload it to developers.
This, of course, is regarded as a Travesty Of Vancouver History, and a Great Shame if the theatre isn't preserved.
The problem here is that this piece of Vancouver History is right bang in the middle of Vancouver Present: Hastings Street between Main and Columbia -- surrounded by drug-dealing, open-air drug using, prostitution, and general utter despair.
So this raises an interesting question: in what parallel universe should Saving The Pantages be a civic priority -- or anyone's priority, for that matter?
See, while ministering the Gospel on the Downtown East Side, I've come to realize that the main enemy we are battling -- perhaps even greater than hopelessness -- is the spirit of abandonment. People who wind up there feel they've been abandoned -- by family, friends, the world ... even by God. There's little to dissuade them of that: police are seen as the enemies, allegedly cracking down on them and moving them along; slumlords take advantage of them; welfare workers are woefully overworked and seem (seem) to be not overburdened with heart; methadone clinic workers (and we'll blog about this separately) take government money, kick some of it back to their "clients" and verbally abuse these people; and there's an official line supporting the idea that the best thing for them is to provide a safe place to shoot up, which means that drug addicts are beyond redemption.
In other words ... they've been abandoned.
Now, along comes a group of "well-meaning arts-loving citizens", wanting to attract funding to spruce up this dilapidated pile of bricks into ... what? An art gallery ... theatre ... "performing space" ... ?
I knew a woman once whose natural father stonewalled for years on sending support payments, then one day showed up with a high school grad present: a car. The implication was that this was essentially in lieu of the support payments (although I never got the full story) ... but the story here is relevant, because it analogizes the folly of this whole exercise:
- 50 years after the heyday of the Pantages/Avon, there is doom and despair on the DTES
- a group of people wants to convince others that spending big bucks on this theatre is a priority
- if your life was on the DTES, what would you think?
- that people outside the DTES aren't willing to provide what we need, but are willing to shell out for some old pile of bricks
- translation: more abandonment
It's not even about the money, you realize. It costs nothing to minister hope to people. Keeping the rent paid at Gospel Mission / The Lord's Rain is a pittance, compared to the cost of restoring the Pantages.
Interesting side-note: one of the principals in this movement to restore the Pantages is also involved with the group that took over the lease on the building that housed Rainbow Mission. In 2006, Rainbow Mission, which had served the DTES for almost 60 years, was evicted, to make room for a women's shelter society. Not that there's anything wrong with a women's shelter society, but the Rainbow was ministering to everyone as Jesus did, regardless of race, gender, or religious background. There are a lot of guys who were regulars at the Rainbow, whom I have not seen since we closed the place in January 2007. Rainbow Mission was their hope-line, and I don't know where or if they've found it since. Add to that the notion that they have to be of a certain gender and possibly of a certain ethnicity in order to "qualify" for help, and you can see, again, the sense of abandonment.
