Petcetera founder’s $22.5-million heritage theme park opens June 1
Yvonne Zacharias
Sun
Danny Guillaume, president and CEO of Historical Xperiences Inc., stands on scaffolding where a big lift will transport Storyeum customers into B.C. history. CREDIT: Steve Bosch, Vancouver Sun
What is not a museum, not live theatre and not strictly a tourist trap but a little bit of all three? It’s a Storyeum, under construction in Gastown as we speak and getting ready to open June 1.
It takes the dry stuff of textbooks and lectures, adds a dash of Disney, then invites the public to line up and fork over around $20 apiece (around $15 for kids) to be entertained a little and shown jazzed-up schoolhouse lessons out of school.
Located underground between Cordova and Water streets, the place will be the equivalent of six hockey rinks in size. You enter via an elevator that resembles a deep well. Once underground, tourgoers will be walked through the chapters in B.C. history, starting with a creation story focusing on the province’s natural resources and the arrival of people on mother Earth. Then onward through a temperate rain forest, a longhouse and so on.
It’s all done with more than 100 performers doing the storytelling and plenty of special effects. Such good ones, claims Graeme Drew, vice-president of marketing and communications for the outfit building it, Historical Xperiences, that at one point you will feel the wind in your hair like you are on a tall ship on the ocean.
The new kid on the Gastown block aims to tap the “soft historian” — not the nerdy guy who signs up for a PhD in medieval studies, but the type who wants to know a little more about the past without suffering too much to learn it. It also taps a powerful craving by baby boomers to travel and see neat things.
Unlike a regular museum where you roam at will, takers will be waltzed through a tightly choreographed 80-minute show. In tourism industry parlance, it’s called “pulsing” the groups. Drew says the project has the capacity to “pulse” through 199 people every 15 minutes. After all that pulsing, there will be a themed restaurant and gift shop for de-pulsing at the exit on Cordova Street.
It promises to be an adventure from entrepreneurial perspective, too; private investors came up with the $22.5 million needed to float the heritage-themed dream. About half of that is coming from some 700 people who have bought debentures in a trust with a guarantee of a 10-per-cent annual return. The higher the ticket sales, the greater the return, giving this army of small-fry investors a powerful incentive to go out and sell the place.
Some people hawk shoes and soap for a profit. In the same way, the small fry and some pretty big fish who put together Historical Xperiences are hoping to make big bucks selling history and tourism.
They come under the protective wing of the City of Vancouver, which will lease space to the principals as part of a $35-million city project involving the reconstruction of two parkades fronted by three levels of office space.
Naturally, Storyeum had to start with a brainy idea and the bucks to back it.
Enter Danny Guillaume, a Saskatchewan farm boy who became founder and a former owner of Petcetera, the big-box store for pets.
After getting out of the pet-supply business, he settled on the idea of selling history as entertainment and chose his hometown of Moose Jaw, Sask. as the testing ground for his new theory.
In the summer of 2000, Guillaume’s Tunnels of Moose Jaw opened, playing up the antics of gangsters like Al Capone who used the tunnels for their escapades. According to Drew, the attraction has been a rip-roaring success. In little old Moose Jaw, pop. 35,000, it sold more than 100,000 tickets in one year and remains popular.
It has turned a moribund downtown core in a decaying prairie city into a happening place. No one believed this was possible.
With Vancouver being 40 times the size of the prairie city, Drew estimates Storyeum can easily meet its target of 800,000 in the first year and one million by year three. He figures it can also revitalize the country’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside.
Research shows tourists tend to hit four attractions when they visit a city. In Vancouver, in order of preference, those are Grouse Mountain (1.1 million visitors annually), the aquarium (one million) and the Capilano Suspension Bridge (850,000). Science World is currently the fourth. The partners hope Storyeum can make it into the top-four list.
Seattle was in the running for the project but Guillaume decided to settle on Vancouver where he now lives.
He was not around to be interviewed for this story. He had to dash off to Moose Jaw to bail out his beloved tunnels after they were doused by firefighters when a major fire struck the city early in the new year.
But Drew, who is a close friend to Guillaume, said his business partner wanted to make a difference when he sold Petcetera and to achieve some non-economic goals. Both partners are passionate about history, believing that much of it will be lost unless bold steps are taken to preserve it.
To come up with the script, Historical Xperiences has held coffee clubs with historians, got its hands on dozens of history books and got First Nations people seriously involved. It now has its third team of script writers working on the final touches.
Jon Stovell, president of the Gastown Business Improvement Society, said the project represents the largest investment in Gastown in many years.
“Of course, we’re very supportive,” said Stovell, adding he believes the project won’t just appeal to tourists but to school kids and locals as well.
He said Guillaume has a proven track record.
Of Storyeum, Drew said, “It’s a case of simple but powerful storytelling.”
© Copyright 2004 Vancouver Sun