A Little Love On A March Night In Nanaimo

(I started writing this in mid-March but got side tracked with other stuff in my life.)

There isn’t a lot happening in the city of Nanaimo, BC during the long winter nights. On most weekday evenings you can walk into a number of pubs around town and find less than 10 patrons. With a population of about 87,000 people, many who live in Nanaimo and the surrounding area are over 65 years of age and retired and going to a pub or out for dinner is usually an every now and then thing if it all. With so many retirees around you might think that an affordable restaurant like the Swiss Chalet would be thriving but they packed it in a year or two ago.

There’s not much in the way of industry here. Several years ago the local Harmac Pulp Mill went bust and the operation was taken over by former employees who invested their own cash in the business. Today it is making money and is one of just a few industrial successes in the city. Nanaimo is tough place to make a go of it in business. Most of our economy is based on the service industry, retail, and tourism. The 2 biggest employers are Vancouver Island University and the provincial government. Once their schooling is done many young Nanaimo residents take off for greener pastures in Vancouver and Alberta.

Nanaimo may be a great place to retire to but not so great if one is prone to SAD (seasonal affective disorder).  Some get around the rain and frequent grey days in winter by escaping to somewhere warm and sunny like Mexico for several months. Most of us older folks have learned how to adapt to the rain. We just put some kind of rain gear on and go for our walks with or without a dog. Rain sure beats the hell out of shoveling snow. And contrary to some opinions it doesn’t rain every day here in the winter.

We are aware that a good part of Canada has experienced a relentless winter with one snowstorm after another. It is hard not to gloat when most of Vancouver Island has barely seen a trace of snow this winter and the daffodils have been in bloom since the beginning of March.

Most of us (particularly the older ones) think that Vancouver Island is the best place to live anywhere. The ocean is always close by as is all kinds of wilderness including gorgeous lakes and beaches within a short driving distance. For the past number of years we have had really great summers with long periods of sunshine. For some reason mosquitoes are rare. There are people here who fish, hike, kayak, or even play golf most of the year including during the winter. Where else in Canada could you see killer whales chasing dolphins near the Departure Bay ferry terminal in Nanaimo on a winter’s day?

 

Still the winter season can drag on even if there isn’t any snow on the ground. The winter doldrums can set in a bit. Yes we have our favourite sushi place that we go to now and then and once in a while we’ll grab a hot dog while at Costco. Every so often we’ll have some folks over for dinner or go over to their place. We’ve gone to see our friend and guitar teacher play at a local pub several times and we spent a February Sunday afternoon watching some jazz down at Crofton about 45 minutes away.

About a month ago I started thinking about going over to Vancouver and us catching some big name group at Rogers Arena. Fleetwood Mac sounded good until I saw the ticket prices. 200 bucks a seat and up in the gods. Ouch! Add on the ferry ride and it would be over 600 bucks for the 2 of us.

I decided to check out our local Port Theatre. We’ve been there a number of times, once to see Montreal jazz great Oliver Jones. It’s a first class theatre. I found out that for something like 44 bucks each we could see blues singer Jim Byrnes, former rocker Barney Bentall, and some guy I had never heard of, John Mann.

Port Theatre-Nanaimo, BC

Over the years I’ve probably seen Jim Byrnes about a dozen times, mostly at the now defunct Yale Hotel on Granville Street in Vancouver. (I wrote a story about the Yale on my blog in April of 2013). The admission at the Yale back then was about 10 bucks. If you have ever spent some time watching Jim Byrnes and walked away disappointed you are clearly messed up. There aren’t a lot of blues greats like Jim around anymore.

I was aware of Barney Bentall but he was a bit after my bar cruising days in Vancouver. Along with his band The Legendary Hearts their biggest hit was probably “Got Something To Live For” in 1987. Canada sure produced a lot of really decent rock bands in the 1980s including The Tragically Hip, 54-40, Spirit Of The West, Honeymoon Suite, Grapes of Wrath, Cowboy Junkies, Pursuit of Happiness, Tom Cochrane, Colin James, Jeff Healey, Platinum Blonde, Parachute Club, Men Without Hats, and The Northern Pikes. 

The concert we were going to see was on Friday the 13^th of this March. Indoor parking right next to The Port Theatre cost us something like 3 bucks which is a lot less than indoor parking in Vancouver. As we were taking the short walk to the theatre we quickly realized that the majority of the audience was going to be people 60 years of age and older. There were a few between 40 and 60 years of age but I can’t recall noticing anyone under 40. That’s just the way it is in Nanaimo I guess. Jazz and blues tends to draw older folks here.

 

Our seats were about 10 rows back from the stage. There were quite a number of guitars set up and ready to go. This was going to be a good evening.

Jim Byrnes

 

Of the 3 main artists performing this evening Jim Byrnes at 66 was the oldest. Jim was born and raised in the north side of St. Louis, Missouri. He got interested in the blues at an early age and one the house bands in the area he lived in was Ike and Tina Turner. By the age of 13 Jim was singing and playing guitar to blues music. His first professional gig was in 1964.

When Jim was 5 years old he came down with a massive lung infection that left him bedridden and sometimes comatose over a period of 3 months. It wouldn’t be his last brush with death. Two years into college he dropped out, hit the road, and lived the hippie lifestyle. “I was living in teepees and wearing eagle feathers in my hair” he once said. He was drafted and later took off to Canada for 3-1/2 years. Who could blame him? Viet Nam was such a fucking shitty war. His going AWOL didn’t sit well with his parents.

In 1969 on a visit home to see his parents in Missouri he was arrested for desertion and spent 3 months in the slammer. After serving his time he took off again to the west coast of Canada. In 1970 Jim became a father for the first time and did a number of things aside from performing to support his family including commercial fishing and being a shepherd. In 1972 he had another close call with death. He was with a friend on the Old Island Highway on Vancouver Island when their pick-up truck stalled. Jim got out to push the truck and was hit by a car going in the same direction that shoved him under the truck. He was rushed to a hospital in Nanaimo and woke up to find that both of his legs had been amputated.

One can just imagine how devastated he was but after a bit of time he pulled himself together. He was determined not to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and learned how to get about using weighted prosthetics. He spent most of the next 5 years working at odd jobs in the American mid-west before returning to Vancouver in 1977 for good.

I (Colin Paterson) was living in Vancouver for a good part of the 1970s. By about 1975 most of the nightclubs had gone “disco”, places like Annabelle’s in the Four Seasons Hotel on Howe Street where there were long line-ups on Friday and Saturday nights. One of the exceptions was a joint called Rohan’s Rockpile on 4^th Avenue out near UBC that stuck with R & B and rock. The few times I was at Rohan’s it seemed to me to be a kind of diehard hippie place.

If you were young and single back then and wanted to chase woman you pretty well had to put up with disco. Things started to change in the Vancouver music scene around 1980. It was like a breath of fresh air. Enough of this Abba and Saturday Night Fever shit!

I’m not totally sure how it came about but there seemed to be a need for live music and if it was going to be gritty all the better.  It seemed like all of sudden there were a number of blues bands playing around Vancouver led by guys like Jim Byrnes, Al Foreman, Doc Fingers, and The Powder Blues Band led by the Lavin brothers from Chicago.

Some of these groups played at a little joint in Gastown called The Spinning Wheel. A kind of novelty band called Doug and the Slugs played The Spinning Wheel and they were a pretty big deal in Vancouver for several years. Nobody had a voice like the late Doug Bennett. The blues became popular enough that the bands sometimes played larger venues like The Commodore Ballroom on Granville Street. The Commodore had horse hair underneath its dance floor.

The Yale Hotel, in a rundown area of downtown Vancouver, became the home of the blues in the city. The late Long John Baldry played there a number of times. From what I understand The Fairview pub is now the place to see live blues in Vancouver.

Jim Byrnes had done a bit of acting at a local theatre in St. Louis when he was younger and in 1987 he won a supporting role in the TV series Wise Guy. He was also one of the cast members in the TV series Highlander which ran for 6 years. Both series were filmed in Vancouver.

There are some that say that you have to live the life to be able to sing the blues. Maybe that’s why he is one of the last of the greats. Jim Byrnes has won 3 Canadian Junos for best blues album of the year.

"From callow bohemian to weary pilgrim, here’s a little of the journey so far. The city streets of my boyhood; steam heat rising off the Mississippi; the railroad; grits and gravy; the Cardinals and the Dodgers on the radio; summers in Kentucky and the Ozarks; Jimmy Reed at The London House East, Bobby “Blue” Bland at the Cosmo Hall; Muddy at the Moonlight Lounge and Slick’s Lakeside; the High Plains of east Colorado on a winter morning; the Charlie Company Boogie; all those nights in all those rented rooms; the wind off the ocean; the winter storms; the tough break and the heartache; the dust of Mexico; twilight on the Seine; the evening breeze, the distant thunder, the sweetness of the rain; the light and the laughter in my children’s eyes; the constant struggle and infinite joy of love." - Jim Byrnes.

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Barney Bentall

 

I have to confess that I didn’t know much about Barney Bentall. I had never seen him perform. I don’t recall ever even seeing one of his music videos. I had heard some of his songs on the radio. His band’s peak period seems to have been from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. He was born in Toronto, raised in Calgary, and found himself in Vancouver at the age of 20 chasing a woman who would become his wife and the mother of his 4 children.

According to a bio he wrote he wanted to be the next Stephen Stills back then. At the beginning of his musical career he used the pseudonym Brandon Wolf (possibly because he came from a wealthy family that was well known in Vancouver.There are a number of office towers on Burrard Street in Vancouver that were built by the Bentall Corporation.) He struggled musically for a number of years in Vancouver and in 1984 reverted back to his real name. His band, The Legendary Hearts had a big hit in 1987 with a song called “Something To Live For”. The band went out on the road for about the next 10 or 12 years.

In the 1990s Bentall bought a ranch in the Cariboo area of BC and in the year 2000 he decided to run the ranch himself. He did that for 6 years. In 2007 he jumped back into the music scene. He was no longer just a flat out rocker. These days he has partnered with musicians with various backgrounds including folk (Shari Ulrich), blues (plays some harmonica), and country. Every now and then his old band plays a few dates. He looks like he is in pretty decent shape for a guy closing in in 60 years of age. Hard work on a ranch can do that to a guy. 
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John Mann

John Mann-2nd from far right.

If I didn’t know a lot about Barney Bentall I sure as hell didn’t know anything about who John Mann was. I did a bit of reading up. John Mann was the lead singer for a Vancouver band called Spirit Of The West who were kind of known for their Celtic kind of music mostly in the 1990s. He is 52 years old and grew up in Calgary, Alberta.

He moved to Vancouver in the early 80s to study theatre. In 1983 he formed the band Spirit Of The West along with some friends. One of the bands most popular songs was “Home For A Rest” which apparently is a popular drinking song in some places in Canada.

In the late 1990s Mann resumed his thespian career and acted in a number of plays in the Vancouver area including Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men. He has also appeared on a number of TV shows including Da Vinci’s Inquest, Battlestar Galactica, and Smallville.

In 2009 Mann was diagnosed with colorectal cancer and two years later he had made a full recovery. In 2014 he found out that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
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The lights went down in The Port Theatre except for the stage and Jim Byrnes led off the night with a blues tune. Throughout the night Byrnes told the audience of some of his remembrances including driving around in Waylon Jenning’s Cadillac in Nashville. He didn’t get into the details but he mentioned how his life was saved many years before at the local Nanaimo hospital. Byrnes sat to the right side of the stage while he sang and played his guitar.



Jim Byrnes

Barney Bentall sang a few of his songs including some newer stuff. He also played harmonica backing up Byrnes. At one point in the evening Barney Bentall mentioned that it used to scare the crap out of his band when they had to come over from Vancouver and play Nanaimo. I guess that was back when Nanaimo was more of a wild mill town unlike the retirement community it sometimes resembles today.

Barney Bentall

John Mann was the 3^rd of the three to sing. Some in the audience knew that he was struggling because of his condition. He faltered a few times and turned that awkwardness into some laughs. This certainly wasn’t going to be a pity party.

John Mann

It is hard to know exactly what state John Mann was in but one could easily see that he was into his music by his head bobbing and feet shuffling. When he wasn’t singing he was assisted off of the stage by the keyboardist. One of the back-up guitarists (I think it was the bass player) grew up in Nanaimo and once played with a local band called The Windjammers. A few jokes were made about that name by Barney Bentall. A young guy in the group played the mandolin and regular guitar. The drummer was excellent. These guys were professionals!

We went out for a smoke during intermission. (Yeah I still smoke.) A gal outside talked about seeing Rod Stewart or was it Elton John in Las Vegas. Shortly after we got back to our seats, two guys in their forties turned up. They had had a few drinks and started yelling up at the guys on stage. Fortunately they calmed down and they cut out early.

The high point of the second half of the show certainly had to have been when John Mann started to bounce around on his feet on the stage. Barney Bentall joined in and they were both bouncing away. It was one sweet moment.

There were encores at the end of the second set, the band waved and the crowd loved it. It was a great night. We all made our way back to our cars and went home. I started thinking. How did these guys ever meet one another? The mutual respect was pretty obvious. An old lyric from a Seals and Crofts tune from 1973 came into my head…….

“We may never pass this way again…..”

More photos.......

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Yale

 

It is a Friday or Saturday night sometime between 1995 and 2005. I’m driving into Vancouver from the burbs out in Richmond, BC. It is raining out. I cross over the Granville Street Bridge, pass the Cecil Hotel and there it is with the neon sign with the saxophone on the corner of Drake and Granville, the 3 story building that dates back to the 1880s, the home of the blues in Vancouver for many years, The Yale Hotel.

I drive a little further up Granville Avenue. I can see the run down shops to my left and the second hand bookstores. Ahead of me is the movie theatre area that runs to West Georgia Street. The many neon signs are reflected on the wet pavement. I make a right turn and then another right turn and start heading in the direction I just came from. Off to one side of me I can see a line-up outside of some huge nightclub that caters to people in their twenties. The name of the nightclub escapes me. Parking is at a premium in this area on a weekend night.

I park my car underneath the Granville Street Bridge or on Pacific Boulevard. It isn’t exactly a well- lit area. I wait for a break in the traffic on Pacific Boulevard and run across the street when the chance comes along. There is a curved pedestrian walkway that leads up to Granville Street that I take. I pass the Cecil Hotel that is renowned for its strippers. As I near the front door to the Yale I peak in the front windows and can see some folks playing pool. A few people, maybe street people, are milling about the entranceway. The outdoor hotdog stand that is usually on the corner is just setting up for business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMT03WSWiyg

Just inside the front door of The Yale is a small coat check room with a thin counter. Most people keep their coats with them if they are wearing one. An older gal behind the counter collects the cover charge. I walk up a few steps. I can see the stage at the far end of the room. It is about 7:30 p.m. and the joint is just starting to fill up. The carpet on the floor is well worn. The walls are made of brick. Off to the right is the bar seating area with about 20 stools. These are some of the choicest seats in the house. The service bar wraps around and faces the area where the two pool tables are. Behind the pool tables, on the brick wall, are some photographs of musicians who have played at The Yale in the past. There is a small area by the bar with a metal railing where the waitresses pick up their drinks.

 

Over by the pool tables is a chalk board. People write their names on the board to indicate who gets to challenge the winner of the pool game that is currently going on. You might very well see a guy in a suit and tie playing against a gal in her thirties with black hair with purple streaks. The crowd at The Yale is very eclectic. People came from a wide variety of backgrounds. The Yale has a bouncer or two, usually guys around 40 years of age or older, but there are hardly ever any fights or disturbances. It isn’t that kind of place. Drunk or not, patrons tend to mind their Ps and Qs.

The Yale drew people from all kinds of walks of life. On any given weekend night you might see older guys with pony tails who still had a bit of the 1960s in them, middle aged suburbanites or tourists out for a night on the town, the occasional pimp, businessmen in suits who hadn’t gone home to change into more casual clothes, some shuckers and jivers, old friends of the band that was playing that night, every now and then a few bikers, university kids who had had a few brewskies at the nearby Cecil Hotel as warm-up to the evening, mysterious looking guys in raincoats, gals in their forties and older who still had it going on, and younger couples on date night. To some well to do yuppie types this joint might be considered as “slumming”.

The Yale was also a great singles bar, particularly if you were getting up there in years. The first gal I went out with after splitting up with my ex was an Italian lady I met at the Yale. It was a short lived relationship that I just wasn’t ready for after 14 years of marriage. I hope her life has gone well.

Every once in a while a waitress would try and short change me. It would take me more than a few beers not to be able to count and I never had more than a few beers. In a way, I kind of found it funny that they would try that on me. My guess is I didn’t catch them every time. The smoking ban came in and the ashtrays were removed and for a year or two the staff would look the other way if you lit up a smoke. I am sure somebody along the way picked up a beer bottle with a few wet butts in it and gagged.

By around 9:00 p.m. the joint would be close to full with a line-up outside waiting to get in. Up on the stage the band for the night would be tuning up their instruments. There was a fair amount of noise in the room with people talking, glasses clinking, and some piped in blues music. A roadie or two might be seen scurrying around the stage doing last minute sound checks. The lighting guy was ready to go.

I think the stage had a curtain but I don’t remember ever seeing it. The band for the night would walk out on the stage, make sure their instruments were tuned. This was usually about 10-15 minutes before they started playing. At around 9:15 or 9:30 the music started. Usually there wasn’t any introduction. The music just began blasting. Almost always the first tune was kind of peppy to get the crowd in the mood. Those that were more confident about their dancing skills and others that couldn’t give a shit about those skills were often the first on the dance floor. If you were looking at picking someone up it was a good idea to make an early move. If you were a single guy you probably had the place pretty well scoped out way before the music started.

Rocking the joint.

So what is this thing called “rhythm and blues”? If the “blues” means sadness it hardly ever was reflected in the music played at The Yale. It was far more like party time. 

If you came of age like I did in the 1960s, you were aware of the folkie years and coffee houses and hippie joints where people like B.B. King played. Even if you knew very little about R & B you had probably heard the song “The Thrill Has Gone”. If you were a little more curious you might have listened to 33-1/3 albums by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, or Willie Dixon. You might be familiar with Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, or Taj Mahal. You might have heard something by Bobby “Blue” Bland.

B.B. King
 

Around 1980 in Vancouver there were two local bands that created a local following and got some exposure across Canada and the US. Both bands played at a small club in Gastown called the Spinning Wheel. One of the groups was Doug And The Slugs (Doug Bennett had a unique voice and died way too young) and the other group was a band called Powder Blues headed by Tom Lavin. His brother Jack was also in the band along  with a cool saxophone player, David Woodward, who had previously been with The Downchild Blues Band. Probably more than anyone else, the Powder Blues created a wider interest in the blues in Vancouver.

Powder Blues Band early years.

If you followed the British invasion back in the 1960s at all you knew that bands like the Rolling Stones were heavily influenced by imported blues music records from the US. At one time Rod Stewart, Elton John, and Long John Baldry played in the same blues band in the UK.

It is interesting to note that many who have played The Yale over the years had settled in Vancouver after growing up and living in other places. Tom Lavin and his brother grew up in Chicago. Jim Byrnes came from the St. Louis, Missouri area. Long John Baldry was from the UK. I have to wonder if they still see Vancouver as the same city they discovered many years ago. That they decided to call Vancouver their home must have a lot to do with the friends they have met over the years. I don’t think they watch The Real Housewives of Vancouver and I don’t think they are probably totally thrilled when they see another hi-rise condo being built.

When you think about it, most of those who play R & B are in their 50s and 60s. You hardly ever see a younger guy up on the stage. I think R& B is kind of like Viagra to a lot of them. Most of these musicians like jazz but probably find it too sedate. Rock and roll kind of died a long time ago and a lot of it was kind of saccharine. Playing R & B shows that you have made a long time commitment to a music that can’t be learned in 5 minutes. It also shows that you still have some shit disturber in you. You have seen the good and the bad times and R & B was always about the good times.

Over a period of about 10 years, I must have been in The Yale 50 times. I saw Brickhouse, Russell Jackson, Widemouth Mason, Doc Fingers, Long John Baldry, Jim Byrnes, Powder Blues, Gerry Doucette, and many others. I was never ever disappointed.

 

 

The late Long John Baldry

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJy-u2OyEc4

 

Jim Byrnes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR4zDKUepCI

The dance floor has filled up. Occasionally somebody will go bouncing into a nearby table. The place is packed with people standing on the emergency exit steps and it is standing room only. If you were going to make your move it is now probably too late unless you are standing beside some good looking gal. A young lady in a long dress wanders through the place selling roses. Buying some flowers for some gal you had just met moments before might just be a tad on the cheesy side.

I used to have a routine at The Yale. I drank a maximum of 3 beers (usually Heinekens) and about an hour before I planned to leave I would order a coffee. One night I went out and got into my car for the trip home. I rounded a corner and lo and behold I was faced with a police roadblock. When it was my turn to answer some questions a women cop said to me “Have you got decals for this rig?” I thought for sure I was going to have to blow into breathalyser. It turned out that I hadn’t put the decal on my back plate. I got out of the car and started fumbling with the backing on the decal. It was raining out and the woman cop came over and gave me a rag to dry off the area where the decal was supposed to go. I lucked out that night.

The last time I was at The Yale was about 4 years ago. The billing for the night was Jim Byrnes and Bill Henderson and Chilliwack. I went with my girlfriend Linda and my son Dean. Up ahead of us in the line-up was Jack McIlhargey, the former Canuck player and coach. The Yale was a popular spot for the famous and near famous. One night a gal I danced with claimed to be professional Canadian golfer Sandra Post. It was great evening with Linda and Dean and the joint rocked. I was very glad to expose some more people to the unique place that the Yale was.

Bill Henderson and Chilliwack

Nobody ever got rich playing the Yale. Rich or not, a lot of the musicians had big hearts. A lot of fund raising was done over the years at The Yale for good causes. When I was doing a bit of research on this story I went through some videos on YouTube. One of the videos had Dave Woodward on it. He was one cool looking guy back in the day with his head bobbing when he wasn’t playing his sax. He spent 20 years with Powder Blues and 10 years before that with The Downchild Blues Band. For the past several years he has been working with senile older folks and involving them in music. The dude seems like a class act.

I highly recommend looking at Youtube videos of the great musicians who played at The Yale. It will bring back a lot of good memories if you ever happened to stumble into The Yale.

I left Vancouver for Vancouver Island several years ago. About 4 years ago we went a club in Nanaimo called The Queens. The joint reminded me a lot about The Yale. The Queens Hotel dates back to the 1890s. In all the dives and nightclubs I have been to over the years, this particular night was one of the best. Buckwheat Zydeco was the entertainment for the evening and the place shook. Our seats were just a few feet away from the band. I got to shake hands with Buckwheat (Stan Dural) as he left the stage after their last song. As he would say….”It don’t get much better then dat!”

 

Last Christmas Linda bought me guitar lessons for Christmas. I already had a guitar that my son had let me have that wasn’t being used. My guitar teacher’s name is Doug Thring. Doug is a pretty laid back type. After my first lesson Linda asked Doug if he could find an acoustic guitar at a reasonable price. He did just that. We see Doug about once a week for an hour and there are always a few laughs. That G Major is a bitch! I don’t have big expectations. I don’t think I will ever be on any stage but I will learn how to play a few tunes….”Scotch and soda, mud in your eye, baby do I feel high”?

The Yale closed on November 20^th, 2011. I have no idea when the new Yale Hotel is supposed to open. As I understand it a deal was cut where the old Yale would be updated and incorporated into a new condo complex.

I’m no R & B expert, but I actually do know how to walk my dog. I will close this story with a song recommendation for people who like the blues. Look it up on YouTube. It is the blues version of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five by Jimmy Johnson……

“Right now ladies and gents we’re going to take 5 so we can stay alive.

We might take 10 but we’ll be back again.

We might take 20 but when we come back we’re going to play a plenty.

We’re not going to take 30 because that would be kind of dirty.

So if you want to be somebody, get yourself another beer and stay here.

Don’t be a clown and go to town or be a square and walk out and go somewhere.”

One last note…I used to make a lot of homemade CD’s that had themes to them.  If I was doing something on bluesy stuff I would often run the following 3 tunes back to back.

#1 Somewhere Down The Crazy River- Robbie Robertson…”I followed the song of a jukebox coming from up the levee.”

#2 Blue Bayou-Roy Orbsison…”I feel so bad, I’ve got a worried mind…”

#3 Blues In The Night-Peggy Lee…”From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe…”

 

Update:

I was in Vancouver a few days ago and took the following photo of The Yale. The restoration is way behind schedule. I had a brief look inside and it looks like the place has been gutted. A security guy told me I couldn't come in. He also told me that he thought it was a waste of time rebuilding the place and if it was up to him he would have levelled the building. The Yale was built in the 1890's. Vancouver has very few buildings that old. It is well worth restoring as far as I'm concerned.