Petition to save Waldorf Hotel gaining strength
Posted January 10, 2013 8:57 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It looks like Vancouver’s iconic Waldorf Hotel will not go quietly.
A petition to save the 65-year-old nightspot, which is closing down in less than two weeks, is quickly picking up steam.
It didn’t take long for people to react on Twitter and Facebook to word of the club’s closure. Mayor Gregor Robertson was among them, calling it “a big loss to our growing creative community.”
A petition at change.org is asking the mayor to deny a rezoning application to redevelop the site into condominiums.
Toler Thompson is a bouncer at the club; he says this is more than just about 60 people losing their jobs when it closes for good January 20th.
“It’s about the community, really. The Waldorf represents a community in Vancouver that’s under-represented. There’s not a lot in Vancouver for the arts community,” he explains.
“If you go downtown to the venues down there, you see a lot of the same things and here you everything,” he adds.
Brand Manager Danny Fazio tells us he’s proud of what he and his partners have accomplished since relaunching the venue two years ago, citing fruitful relationships with the East Side Culture Crawl, the Polaris Music Prize, the Presentation House Gallery, the Push International Performing Arts Festival, the Vancouver International Film Festival, as well producers like Black Mountain and local luminaries like Douglas Coupland.
“We even started our own cultural institutions like the food cart fest and our big multi-room Halloween and New Year’s parties, so it’s going to be a shame to see all that gone from Vancouver and I think we’re going to see a huge void in the arts and culture and nightlife scene here,” says Fazio.
Fazio feels the club will definitely be missed. “For Vancouver, we really provided an alternative; an eclectic arts and nightclub experience and I think Vancouver needs that. A lot of people called this place a second home.”
The Waldorf first opened in 1947 and has been operating under its current guise since 2010. Club owners decided to pull out when the owner of the site refused to give them anything more than a week-to-week lease.
Fazio doesn’t know what will happen with the site next; he claims the development company has refused to sit down him and his partners.
