Chris McQuillan—one of the co-owners of the Revue Cinema—has contributed a long comment to the North Ronces Blog making his case for why historical designation would be a detriment to the future of the Revue—not only for he and his partners, but also for any future owner and, thus, the community as a whole. I have excerpted Chris’ argument against historical designation below. You can check out the full post, in context, here. For now, I have decided to let Chris speak for himself and reserve my response for a future post. (By the way, Chris, I apologize for not getting this up sooner; I was away for the weekend.)

Over this past week, Darryl (the webmaster at NorthRonces) and I have had a bit of an off-line debate around the proposed pursuit of heritage designation for these properties—and in a larger sense—how to best promote community cinema at the Revue. I can entirely understand why the idea of Heritage Designation appears, on the surface, to be so appealing. On a quick pass, it seems to grant the neighborhood the institution it seeks in perpetuity. The real effect will be the exact opposite.

If you really want to do what is good for community cinema—and to help save the building itself—there needs to be a healthy business living inside to pay its taxes, to maintain its aging walls and to continue with enthusiasm, creativity and continuity as a member of the Roncesvalles community. Any person considering the operation of the cinema takes a considerable financial risk—they have to provide real dollars to, for example, replace equipment, repair the building etc… this investment is ‘lost’ money unless the owner can recover these funds through profitable operations or through an increase in the value of an asset (the property). Under the best circumstances, the Revue could be expected to pay for itself and some modest overhead—it will not return the hundreds of thousands it takes to properly maintain the building and the cinema equipment or to do the periodic major improvements that are necessary. Therefore, the ‘white knight’ will look to the property holding to make some sense of the investment.

If the property is granted a Heritage designation its value will decline significantly. Have a look at The Globe and Mail real estate section in Friday’s paper (June 2nd); there is a article on page 1 about a home in Forest Hill that won’t sell because it is Designated—the price has been droped by $400K and still nothing (you don’t have to take my word for it). Without the security of the property holding an operator will be very reluctant to invest money in the building and business—and based on diminshed value, you won’t get much action from banks either. Why does this matter? Because the Revue is an old building with ageing equipment—it will need more than love of film and sentimentality to keep it in it place as the pride of Roncey. You need a owner-operator who wants to be there, who can make sense of and be willing to continue to invest in the building and business. You will NOT GET THIS from a private citizen(s) if all economic logic is chased from the enterprise.

I’ve been deliberately avoiding the selfish arguments because I am operating on the basis that they don’t matter. As the saying goes, we are where we are, so I am trying to illustrate that on a go-forward basis Roncesvalles’ best bet for a healthy Revue lies not in Heritage protection, but in assisting and supporting it as a private business and as an unencumbered property holding. Nevertheless, I’ll come clean. I don’t want to see a Heritage designation because it will erase, in a second, hundreds of thousands of dollars that we have invested over the many years that we have operated the Revue. I also don’t want to see this building designated because I sincerely believe that it would be the worst outcome for the community. No-one will buy the property—including other cinema operators—it makes no sense to do so.

Our plan for the Revue is to continue to own the property and to either re-open or seek another operator for the cinema business.

I end with a request and a rhetorical question.

Please do not move forward with designation, it would do great harm to us and for the reasons I outlined above I don’t think it gets you to where you want to be either.

Our family has invested our time and energy into community and rep. cinema in Toronto for three decades. We have invested more than a million dollars of our own money to support these businesses through many lean years (no, we’re not rich, just stupid), we’ve gone to the effort to have our realtor (at the Royal) —XL Realty—market the building as a cinema (look at their web site) and we have actively pursued options to find a cinema-operator buyer… after all this, can we not be trusted to do the right thing?

Thanks for your time and understanding.

Chris

PS: month-over-month revenues since we have announced the closures have not really changed much!! – lets see some protest/ support with your wallets – make the tears flow ; )