The Yale Hotel

This post is about loss. The Yale Hotel has been a fixture in Vancouver for more than years than I've been around, for more years than I can imagine.

It's an old-fashioned kind of place on a street that's all about the new. It's a place where the patrons might be 60 or 70 as easily as 25 or 30 in a city full of clubs where only youth is celebrated.

It's a club that celebrates the sorrow and pain of the blues at a time when the world we live in tends to  focus on being happy.

Most of all, though, it's a club that's all about music.

And for now, it's gone. Oh, they say it'll be back better than ever in a year or two, when the condo project that's building itself around the Yale is finished, when the strip club that lived next door for decades is forgotten, when the uneven sidewalk with the trap doors for the booze to be loaded into the basement are turned into perfectly even walkways. When the ratty old carpets and pool tables are gone.

But how can it be better than ever when all that atmosphere is gone? Maybe the carpet will be new. Maybe the pool tables won't have wobbles in them. Maybe the lights and the sound system will be better. But it won't be the Yale. It won't be the same.

I'll miss it.

Kate