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Oct. 12, 2007
Cambie is singing the blues
Local merchants are suffering from prolonged construction.
OLGA LIVSHIN and RON FRIEDMAN
For months now, business owners along the Cambie Street corridor
have been struggling to stay afloat – among them, several Jewish-owned
businesses and Jewish Independent advertisers.
Omnitsky Deli owner Eppy Rappaport has barely managed to keep customers
coming in.
"The pit in front of my deli has been open for a year. It's
hard to get here and to find parking," said Rappaport. Although
he has kept his store open, he has suffered a huge decrease in revenues,
mostly affecting his soup and sandwiches department. The income
from a few tables of his in-store café is totally gone.
Canada Line construction began in October 2005 and the trains won't
start running until the end of 2009.
In media and community announcements, representatives of the Canada
Line have committed to doing all they can to help businesses through
the construction period, and vowed to continue to work in participation
with local merchants and business associations, in an effort to
minimize, as much as possible, construction-related inconvenience
to businesses along the street.
According to a recently released report, the business support programs
consist mostly of transit and newspaper ad campaigns, signage of
the construction areas, retail workshops for the merchants, a special
information website and some other marketing expansions. These endeavors
rely heavily on the goodwill of the participating merchants and
their patrons. But the merchants' goodwill is dwindling as their
business losses pile up.
According to Gregor Robertson, MLA Fairview, Canada Line was careful
not to put its promises setting the extent and duration of the construction
on paper. But the merchants along the construction corridor remember
the discussions prior to the digging, and are angry with Canada
Line, for what they call its breach of promises. One of those assurances,
they say, was that, while practising a tunneling technique known
as "cut-and-cover," excavating only 350 metres of the
street at a time and then covering it up before moving on to the
next stage, construction work would cause no more than three months
of inconvenience in front of each business.
Merchants have been dealing with the construction and the consequential
lack of clients, in different ways. Some have transferred their
businesses elsewhere for good; some are just waiting out the financial
downslide. One establishment, Café Gloucester at 3338 Cambie
St., closed its doors in April 2007 until the end of construction.
The others are hanging on, trying to stay open, living on their
savings and mortgaging their homes to keep their businesses alive.
Omnitsky is at 5866 Cambie St. Rappaport said that, despite the
problems he has faced, he is confident about the survival of his
business. "I have very loyal customers," he said. "They
are willing to fight their way to get to the deli. Besides, I bought
a refrigerator truck before the construction began. To help out
my clients, I'm making home deliveries."
The owner of Marks Pharmacy, at 5760 Cambie St., Marvin Nider, is
not so optimistic. His pharmacy remains empty most of the time,
losing thousands of dollars. Nobody wants to overcome the hurdles
of construction to get their prescriptions filled, when other pharmacies
are open all around the city. Nowadays, the only customers of Marks
Pharmacy come from the medical office next door.
Nider fights for his customers. At one time, he offered a lottery
ticket with every purchase, setting up an expensive television set
as the main prize. He advertised his lottery as widely as he could
but, despite his efforts, very few tickets were distributed and
nobody claimed the TV. To offset his disappearing revenues, Nider
opened another pharmacy on Oak Street. He is not ready to give up
on Cambie though. In the middle of October, he is launching a campaign
at his Cambie location. For a month, he is going to donate his dispensing
fee from every purchase – $8.60 – to Jewish organizations.
He is hoping to lure in some shoppers with this promise. "Of
course, I won't get any money from those sales, but I don't make
them any way," he said gloomily. "At least people might
come in to make a donation."
Doug MacDougal, general manager of Oakridge Centre, is a firm believer
that the line will be very beneficial for the future development
of Cambie Street, and especially for Oakridge Centre. According
to MacDougal, commercial traffic in the shopping mall is down by
10 per cent, which is much lower than the general estimate for Cambie
Street as a whole, which Robertson reports to be closer to 40 per
cent.
The small merchants outside of the shopping centre are suffering,
not only from the huge pit and hubbub of machinery in front of their
stores, but also from radio traffic reports constantly warning drivers
to avoid Cambie Street and its traffic jams.
Canada Line officials say that construction, in many of the sections,
is wrapping up. "We are well ahead of schedule as far as the
cut-and-cover tunnels. In this area of Cambie North [between 2nd
Avenue and King Edward Street] we are going to be finished five
months ahead of schedule, by the end of November," said communications
director Alan Dever. With regards to work taking place further south
on Cambie, Dever said that, in the Oakridge area, the street would
be opened to normal traffic very soon but that the area where the
base stations are situated won't be covered until the middle of
next year. He also said that normalization of traffic flow might
be held up due to the municipal worker's strike.
The suffering of the local residents and business have made their
way into Vancouver's cultural scene, with a short movie titled Nightmare
on Cambie Street, which screened recently at the Vancouver International
Film Festival.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.
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