SPOTLIGHT: Virden determined after fire

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This article was published 26/10/2017 (3128 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VIRDEN — Last month’s fire in downtown Virden had a “crippling effect” on the community but it also presented an opportunity, according to Virden Chamber of Commerce president Carla McLean.

The fire levelled three downtown business spaces, including two units that were being renovated and one that was occupied by a The Source electronics outlet.

Four other business spaces were damaged and remain closed, including the well-known Terry McLean Art Gallery.

The affected properties aren’t located along just any stretch of Virden, but the community’s main downtown core of Seventh Street, where they joined other historic buildings in creating a community centrepiece.

It’s a stretch of downtown that movie scouts singled out for filming of the movie “A Dog’s Purpose” during the summer of 2015.

With an open wound in the town’s downtown core, McLean said that the challenge now would be finding a means of turning the crisis into an opportunity.

McLean said she doesn’t know how, just yet, they’ll make that turnaround, but that it’d take the community coming together to make it happen.

Pitter Patter children’s clothing store Bonnie Lewarne was out of town when the fire took place across the street from her business, and said that the loss of these buildings would add to the many challenges that were already prevalent in downtown Virden.

“It was very tragic, and I just don’t feel like, with the way things are in downtown Virden, that they’ll want to rebuild,” she said, adding that the community’s attitude toward downtown would have to change.

Lewarne’s business has been around for more than 23 years, during which she said there had been “many hard times and frustrating times trying to get people interested in shopping at home.”

With a laugh, she said that it was either “longevity or stupidity” that kept her around for so long.

Even so, she’s found success, overall, and has established a large enough loyal customer base from throughout the area to support her business.

She even has some people come from as far away as Brandon to buy children’s clothing.

This anecdote offers the complete opposite take of some of Virden business owners’ most common concern; that Virden shoppers are meeting their retail needs in Brandon or other communities.

Shari Lyn Fashions owner Amanda Hagan said that approximately 30 to 40 per cent of her customers are from Brandon.

Business has been so good lately that Hagan is almost doubling her business’s footprint by expanding into the space next door, for which she’ll host a grand opening in late November.

“I think people are tired of mall shopping,” she said, adding that for some Brandonites, Virden offers a bit of an excursion away from home.

She said that her business’s regional success comes down to her wide array of clothing shoppers might not find elsewhere, with no more than six of any piece of clothing on display on her racks.

“You need to be interesting to survive,” she said.

Fellow downtown businessperson Clayton Murray relocated to his hometown of Virden a few years ago to buy Virden Footwear, and recently expanded his business enterprise to also include Virden Sport & Fashion.

Rather than wait for the municipality or another such group to lend the downtown business community a hand, Murray has joined forces with handful of other business owners in creating a pre-Christmas weekly Thursday night downtown shopping event they plan on promoting during the coming weeks.

They all share a common goal of drawing people in, he said, adding that they might as well work together to achieve their shared vision for downtown.

“Everybody just needs to work together, which doesn’t always seem to be the case,” he said.

Offering an outsider’s perspective on downtown Virden, Jim Mountain and Brant Hryhorczuk visited Virden this week and hosted a community meeting at Tundra Oil & Gas Place on Tuesday night.

Mayor Jeff McConnell said that they were invited to Virden before last month’s fire took place, but that the disaster added a degree of urgency to their work toward downtown renewal.

Mountain is director of regeneration projects with the National Trust for Canada and Hryhorczuk is a representative of Main Street Saskatchewan, two organizations centred on downtown stewardship.

Both guests offered their insights as longtime downtown stewards and jotted down community members’ visions for the future of their downtown.

From the results of Tuesday’s gathering and additional meetings throughout the week, Mountain will compile a report for the community’s leadership to consider while planning future actions that might impact downtown.

Eating dinner at Virden’s Boston Pizza prior to Tuesday evening’s meeting far removed from the community’s downtown, Mountain motioned out the window to a string of chain restaurants in the area.

Take a picture of this stretch of Virden and show it to someone, he said. “It could be anywhere in North America.”

A picture of downtown Virden would be immediately recognizable, he said; its history highlighted by the various architectural designs combined with whatever upgrades the historic buildings have had undertaken since they were built, in some cases more than a century ago.

“It’s got a really great feel to it,” he said of Virden’s downtown. “It’s walkable … with parks and streams and a theatre.”

Despite last month’s fire decimating three buildings and damaging four others, he said, “There are still great pieces there.”

Drawing insight from other community’s downtowns he has seen flourish over the years, he said that their success always comes down to a strong leader, or a few leaders, taking up the cause.

It also takes perseverance, Hryhorczuk said, adding that reinvigorating any community’s downtown is a process that takes quite a bit of time, and that downtown renewal’s proponents must take on smaller goals that build toward a larger success story.

“This work transcends the mandates of councils,” he said, adding that it takes a clearly defined end goal that everyone can work toward to keep everyone on the same page and set toward achieving the same outcomes.

» tclarke@brandonsun.com

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