Things looked bleak for Hermann’s in 2019.
The building housing the longest continuously running jazz club in Canada on View Street had gone on the market for $4.5 million, after wrangling between heirs of late club founder Hermann Nieweler following his death.
After struggling to keep it going, the heirs handed over control of operations in 2021 to a non-profit community group, which held a series of fundraising concerts to pay for the deposit on the lease.
In March of this year, however, the Arts on View group announced it was ending its second and third-floor lease with Nieweler’s estate to focus on Hermann’s Jazz Club and the View Street Social pub, both located in the same building. Hermann’s Upstairs would cease operations on March 31, it said.
In the end, the City of Victoria purchased the building and associated businesses for $3.95 million this year.
It was an unusual move, but these are unusually difficult times for Victoria’s performing arts community.
It may have weathered a global pandemic, the slow return to normalcy and across-the-board cost increases, but it now finds itself dealing with a form of homelessness in a city where property values continue to rise.
As the number of venues for live music and theatre dwindles, community arts groups often find they are unable to afford even the venues that are available.
“I think it’s properly described as a crisis,” said Matthew White, chief executive of the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, an organization that is also without a home.
The cost of using large venues like the Royal or McPherson Theatre is prohibitive, White said, which leaves arts groups scrambling to find space elsewhere. “If it’s too expensive for us and we’re a $6.5-million-a-year company, what about all of the other amateur and smaller-scale professional ensembles?”
For years, the symphony had priority for rehearsal and performance dates at the Royal Theatre, but the latter increased its rental rate to keep up with rising costs, and is now booking more out-of-city and travelling shows.
Not only does the symphony no longer have dedicated rehearsal space, it has no guarantee of space at any of the regional theatres and doesn’t get priority booking, White said. The symphony has now turned to church halls for rehearsals, and has had to split its performance season between the Royal Theatre and the Farquhar Auditorium at the University of Victoria for cost-related reasons.
White doesn’t blame the Royal, as its funding from the City of Victoria, Saanich and Oak Bay was frozen for 25 years until it was promised a small increase in 2025. “They needed to find more revenue to deal with upkeep,” he said.
Nonetheless, White insists that local performing arts organizations are “vital to our quality of life here and they need to be prioritized, in my opinion.”
A long list of closures
The lack of performance space is most dire in the City of Victoria, which houses most of the region’s performance spaces and theatres.
In the last five years alone, Victoria has seen the closure of Hermann’s Upstairs, the Victoria Event Centre, Club Loading, Quadratic Sound, Copper Owl, Northern Quarter and Logan’s Pub, while across the bridge in Esquimalt, the Carlton Club has been replaced by a new residential project.
Nichola Reddington, the City of Victoria’s manager of arts, culture and events, says she’s worried. Every aspect of performing arts groups’ budgets is increasing — with inflation, the high cost of living in the capital region and rent increases — while the amount of money available through grants has been stagnant or dropping, she said.
At a recent meeting with the Canada Council for the Arts, Reddington said, she learned only 10 per cent of groups applying for grants are successful. While arts groups have better luck getting grants from the City of Victoria, there is increased competition for funding, she said.
“This is not something unique to Victoria. This is happening across Canada. But I do think on the Island we do have a much higher cost of living, and goods and services are just generally [more expensive].”
At the same time, the city is facing its own challenges, as local governments increasingly deal with the impact of climate change, homelessness and social disorder — theoretically the responsibility of senior levels of government — as well as aging infrastructure and the demands of a growing population for new pools, libraries and the upkeep of aging roads, water and sewer systems.
“We’re a city that really values arts and culture, and our council values arts and culture — it’s part of what people love about this city — but it’s getting harder and harder to make the case for culture when you’ve got so many other pressures coming at us,” Reddington said.
Nontheless, Ian Case, director of ceremonies at UVic’s Farquhar Auditorium and a veteran of theatre management in Victoria, said the arts community needs the city to get more involved. “I don’t mean to sound glib about it but it is a case of build it and they will come,” said Case, who has opened venues from Theatre Inconnu to the Metro Studio and Intrepid Theatre Club.
Every arts report at the municipal level has come to the same conclusion — the region needs more venues, he said. “We need to create spaces that start at 50 seats so artists can work their way up, so there is a way to graduate from a 50-seat theatre to 100 or 150.”
Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto said council is committed to supporting the arts and made it part of its strategic plan at the outset of the term. But she also said the fiscal pressure the city is under — the first draft of the city’s 2025 budget would mean a 12.17 per cent tax increase, although the city is trying to reduce that — means it may not be able to do more.
“We’re all in extremely difficult financial positions right now,” she said.
Among the options city staff have provided to trim the city’s 2025 and 2026 budget is cuts across most departments, including arts and culture.
Reddington said when she started in 2009, the city had one arts grant program worth about $356,000, and now there are four streams worth about $1.4 million.
They can also be a gateway to more money for organizations, which can leverage the city’s endorsement when they ask other levels of government, corporate sponsors or donors for support.
“It’s critical financial support that is multiplied several times over,” said Ian Rye, chief executive of 91原创 Opera Victoria, who argues that municipalities can and should do more.
Rye pointed out that while the municipal contribution to the Royal Theatre’s budget is only about three per cent, the Port Theatre in Nanaimo gets about 39 per cent from the regional district, the theatre in Duncan gets about 55 per cent from the municipality and 91原创’s regional theatres, like the Queen Elizabeth and Orpheum, pull 33 per cent of their budget from municipalities.
“Quite frankly, our municipalities contribute a very tiny percentage of the operating revenues for [the Royal and McPherson] compared to other cities, so no, municipalities have not been asked to do much, and they need to do more,” Rye said.
It all comes down to space
While funding is an important issue to the arts community, space — or lack thereof — is critical.
Hence the City of Victoria’s purchase of Hermann’s View Street club, which Reddington said is intended to help keep artists in the region and ensure a home for arts organizations, especially downtown.
Preserving and investing in music spaces downtown is part of the current council’s four-year strategic plan, along with a commitment to provide more accessible spaces.
Reddington said the city doesn’t have the resources to buy all the city’s arts venues, so it looks to options such as providing grants to cover property taxes to buy time to find other solutions. Another option could be changes to the way they provide temporary-use permits and licences if it helps arts organizations continue to work.
“There’s a lot of things in our municipal toolbox that we can do,” she said.
In one recent project, the city provided a grant of $390,000 over two years — 2024 and 2025 — to keep a community arts hub at 780 Blanshard St. operating while city staff study the possibility of securing a longer-term hub.
The current site is operated by the 91原创 Island Visual Arts Society, which created a home for about 80 arts organizations, providing affordable workspace and studios. But the space is temporary, as Reliance Properties owns the building and intends to establish a 77-room hotel and 102-unit residential tower on the site of what was once the B.C. Power Commission building.
Five years ago, there was discussion about establishing a community arts hub at 28 Bastion Square, the former site of the Maritime Museum, but the province, which owns the building, deemed the building unsafe for occupancy.
At the time, the Ministry of Citizens’ Services said the designated national historic site would require more than $20 million in rehabilitation and updates — a figure that has likely increased significantly since then.
Jason Guille, founder of Sunset Labs, a multi-purpose music and arts space at 401 Herald St., said that venue transitioned into its current form when revenue started to dry up 10 years ago. The space, wired and geared up to stage cutting-edge in-person and online events, now hosts a wide range of events, from mayoral debates to science summits.
Guille calls it the “most advanced boutique production studio on the West Coast,” adding: “There is nobody here or in 91原创 who can do what I do now.”
Sunset Labs is not the only bright spot on the horizon.
A group poised to open a new performance space in a former grocery store at 716 Johnson St. — also envisioned as a kind of community arts hub — might get a break if Victoria council agrees to fund a $250,000 grant.
Matthew Payne, veteran of the Victoria theatre scene and artistic director of the Other Guise theatre company, said the grant is critical, since it could open the door to securing two other grants worth as much as $400,000 each.
The space was secured with a $1.5-million loan that has to be paid back. If the theatre group can’t come up with the money to repay the loan, the building would have to be sold and the dream of the new theatre would be lost.
Payne, who says the venue is essential to ensure local talent stays in Victoria, said he has seen all kinds of venues close in recent years. At one point, in quick succession, Kaleidoscope Theatre shut down a venue on Herald Street, Intrepid Theatre shut down a venue at the Bay Centre and Theater Inconnu in Market Square closed.
“It felt like it was all within a year that those three venues shut down. And what we saw was an exodus of young artists from the scene — artists that were coming out of UVic and the 91原创 College of Performing Arts that the small and mid-sized companies love to work with. But there wasn’t any reason for them to stick around.
“We went through a period of about 10 years that was a darker period, and to me it feels like we’re in that same period right now that we’re losing venues, we’re losing steam.”
Payne hopes establishing a new artist-owned venue will help turn that around. Acquiring spaces is a game-changer, he said, since it allows artists to control their own destinies a little more.
Music also got a new venue this month when businessman Al Smith and Christina Morrison, founder of Salsa Caliente dance company, signed a five-year lease with the city to operate the former Hermann’s Upstairs. The Coda Club will open early next year.
The motivation for Smith, a longtime music fan and supporter, is to give local musicians a place where they feel valued. “That’s what prompted us to do this ridiculous endeavour of risking it all on a music venue, which are known to go under these days,” he said.
The Coda Club — which had a capacity of 260 people in its previous incarnation — will be a live music venue, with two stages in separate rooms. Since the announcement, it’s been inundated with interest from local bands. Smith said he’s confident that he and Morrison know what it takes to stay open. “Between the two of us we’re definitely able to tackle the five-year lease, no problem.”
Two blocks away, the Victoria Innovation, Advanced Technology, and Entrepreneurship Council or VIATEC has established a 150-person music venue at Fort Tectoria (777 Fort St.).
Enlisted as a Rifflandia festival venue in the past, it has recently been opened to local bands, which can use the venue at no cost and get proceeds at the door but must provide their own security and gear. VIATEC has a licence to sell food and liquor.
Meanwhile, the Capital Regional District board in November endorsed hiring a consultant to look at options for a new funding model for the region’s performing-arts centres, including ones that would see all CRD municipalities and electoral areas fund the McPherson, Royal and Charlie White Theatre at the Mary Winspear Centre.
Some options include a theatre rental grant estimated at $350,000 annually that would provide funding for local arts groups to be able to afford to use the larger venues. CRD staff say the proposed grant program has the potential to subsidize 60 to 80 shows at the three under-used regional theatres.
White said he loves the idea of a theatre-rental grant program because it creates incentive for municipalities to buy in, as it helps arts groups in their areas. “It just increases the use of the theatre, and then that just generates more money,” he said.
If nothing changes, however, the risk of losing performing arts groups is high, he said.
“I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say if you don’t have an affordable venue for artistic institutions in your community, you risk losing them completely.”
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