A commentary by a Victoria resident.
In response to the City of Victoria’s underwhelming proposal to convert a key Inner Harbour site from pavement and parking to grass and benches (Victoria’s default response when the going gets turf), a few recent letters to this paper have encouraged the city to look to the Sydney Opera House and the Oslo National Opera House for inspiration.
Regarding the latter, the letter-writer was the estimable Victoria architect Terence Williams who paints a tantalizing picture of a multi-performing arts facility that could showcase significant local and visiting creative talent in a dramatic building in a blue-chip symbolic setting.
My concern is not with the architectural results which, no doubt, would, following a capital expenditure $200 million or more, be eye-popping, but with seven people showing up to listen to Schubert string quartets.
Both cultural expression and how people take in their culture are changing — radically and quickly. Live classical (or traditional) culture is staring at oblivion; and so-called online delivery, in terms of dimensionality and realism, is just getting started.
I’m an enormous fan of the Liszt transcription of Schubert’s Soirees de Vienne Valse-Caprice No. 6. Courtesy of YouTube, I can, notionally for free, catch any of 35 studio or live recorded performances, including that of my beloved Vladimir Horowitz.
I assume, without a jot of doubt, that new whiz-bang projection technology soon will allow me to be sitting beside him on the piano bench, page-turning the score.
So, if grass and a handful of benches is waste of a key public site, and a performing arts centre a waste of dough and a misreading of the cultural near-future, what should go there?
Costco.
Thousands of people, all day and every day and evening. Admittedly, meh for high culture, but one of the great democratizing institutions of our time and, without question, the cornerstone of a downtown renaissance.
Downtown repopulation and a transformation of the public realm. A zillion new direct and indirect jobs as the downtown economy rebounds.
Mabel’s Knit ’N’ Sew relocates from a forlorn storefront on Broad and Broughton to Wharf Street and does a land-office business.
And think of the cornucopian access: TVs the size of highway billboards, Romaine lettuce in feed-the-masses-size packages. Delicious, big whole-roasted chickens still $7.99.
And not to mention an opportunity to photograph and then blackmail sniffy “Oh, I never shop in stores like that” Fairfielders beetling out with an armload of California Roll six-paks.
Not that a mean-spirited thought like that would ever cross my mind.
The Costco thing was just to get your attention; to cap this, I agree with Williams and others who urge the city to think big and beautiful, but it’s also necessary, as downtown confronts growing economic and social challenges, to think future and means of survival.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
