In late November, Cineplex will open the doors to its newest The Rec Room location, in Vancouver.
The first major venue to potentially re-energize the beleaguered Granville Entertainment District is finally set to open after being in the works for years.
In late November, Cineplex will open the doors to its newest The Rec Room location. It will be a 45,000 square foot, three-storey-plus-basement, entertainment centre with restaurants, bars and food court-like eating options. There are spaces for live entertainment, private party rooms, a hub of the newest virtual reality arcade and video games, as well as mini-golf and axe-throwing.
In the basement, colourful, floor-to-ceiling murals of tropical plant leaves and birds, old-style ceiling fans and bamboo lanterns are supposed to evoke the feeling of an endless summer in an area named The Palms. It’s a nod to the location’s original Palms Hotel, which was built in 1893.
Upstairs in a meeting room, the walls are covered in a giant black-and-white image of Granville Street when there were still streetcars running and another one of its colourful, nighttime lights.
“We really wanted to engage with the street and bring that neon and excitement that is here and has historically been here,” said Sara Moore, chief marketing officer at Cineplex. “It’s going to be beautifully lit in here, so it’s really going to stand out as this great jewel on the street.”
The opening marks the full transforming of the old Empire Granville 7 movie theatre complex, which closed in 2012. Cineplex first announced its plans for The Rec Room in 2019. COVID-19 quashed its original opening date in 2020.
There are a lot of hopes for what the Granville area could be, but also some significant hurdles to those dreams.
These plans had been in the works for seven years and included a 17-storey office tower to anchor a project that would have also preserved cherished cultural institutions, including the Commodore Ballroom and the Commodore Lanes and Billiards Hall.
It was a major blow to the city’s hopes for re-energizing the area as the company cited the high interest rates and being unable to sign up office tenants as tech companies downsized.
Last summer, the city and its ruling ABC party had started seeking public input on the kind of nightlife, culture and all-hours fun that could be injected into this part of Granville Street even as the area also struggled with post-pandemic street violence, disorder and store vacancies.
Mayor Ken Sim, in particular, cited it as a focal point as he welcomed ideas for increasing the city’s level of “swagger.”
“We will listen to probably most of them, right?” Sim said in June 2023. “Some of them might suck, but you know, I always say sometimes the craziest ideas are the best ones.”
Scott Primrose of Lee & Associates Commercial Real Estate Services, which is leasing a property near Granville and Nelson streets a few blocks away from The Rec Room, has owned property in the area since the 1980s.
“Granville Street is in an in-between phase. Bonnis leaving isn’t going to stop others and they are still involved with other buildings on the street. The (City of Vancouver) goes up and down like a wave on Granville Street. They haven’t recaptured what it was yet.”
Primrose said there are “more counter-culture businesses, one-room hotels or SROs, and the population dictates what goes in and around the retail. It adds a flavour like no other street. The (City of Vancouver) wants it to be an entertainment area harking back to the days of stained glass and neon signs. That’s where they think they’re going, but there needs to be more and better entertainment as it’s largely bars.”
He thinks that The Rec Room will provide what’s needed and it will help a lot.
With files from Dan Fumano