Post by KevDreger on Sept 10, 2007 12:02:48 GMT -5
A hotel with a colourful past
It is the final countdown for the Willow Inn Hotel. A fixture on Kelowna’s waterfront since 1928, the seedy strip joint is shutting its doors at the end of the month with plans to redevelop the property waiting in the wings. While it may have been known for the motorcycles that line the sidewalk out front, there’s a lot of history living in the old hotel’s walls. Capital News reporter Jennifer Smith takes you through the doors of the notorious inn for a look at where it all came from and how the Willow’s story ends.
By Jennifer Smith
Staff reporter
Sep 09 2007
The Willow Inn’s Sept. 30 closure will end a colourful chapter in Kelowna’s downtown core history
The whisperings at the Willow Inn started with rumours of skyscrapers and a metropolitan real estate deal that included new shops, expensive townhouses and a lakeside boardwalk.
Edmonton-based developer Philip Milroy had seen a fortune beneath the ramshackle stucco of the 79-year-old building, in the holes engineers drilled to test if the silty waterfront could withstand a larger build-out.
His vision for the lot included four towers and a fountain that doubled as an outdoor skating rink during the winter. The plans quickly went public.
Whether the community rejected him or the concept is a matter of opinion, but the hype on Milroy’s Lawson’s Landing deal did not meet with a positive reaction.
Rumour of the plans tore through Kelowna like a windstorm through the old hotel’s namesake, rustling up all kinds of trouble for the wealthy outsider.
The developer argued he was trying to turn over a new leaf for the seedy downtown corner.
The customer base at the inn itself had long since faded into the woodwork, and owner Ken Noble was willing to sell.
“There were too many other bars in town,” Noble said in interview last month.
So Milroy secured an interest in the Willow Inn property and then the plans hit stumbling block after stumbling block, the final blow coming when the federal department of fisheries and oceans rejected the idea of building out into the Okanagan Lake foreshore.
Then three weeks ago, a solution was announced.
Milroy would fund a study to redeveloping a four-block section of the downtown core, including the valuable hotel lots, and that the sale of the Willow Inn could now carry through.
At the end of September, the motorcycles lining Queensway Avenue will fade into the sunset along with the early risers who meet inside for a 9 a.m. beer.
Berate its musty halls. Call it a biker bar if you must, but for Noble and a small community at the end of Queensway Avenue, losing the Willow will mark the end of an era, a lifestyle, and in many cases a good, if hard-earned, living. There are definitely those who, million dollar homes and business opportunities aside, will be sorry to see the notorious inn go.
“It’s like that bar from the TV show; you know, where everyone knows your name and they’re always glad you came,” stripper Adrian Anderson said when asked for an interview on her last tour through the Willow Inn in August.
The petite blond Albertan hit the Willow’s doorstep almost nine years ago, already with a good eight years on the circuit under her belt.
She was treated well, even given one of the hotel’s robes for the week.
“Some places you walk in and everybody feels cold,” she said, recounting stories of bar managers who scream if dancer is a hair late to the stage.
Kelowna’s customer base is anything but lucrative, she said. Her noon-hour show on the Wednesday afternoon she was interviewed drew a slim 30 people, many who preferred a view from the pool tables at the back of the hall.
She was tired after a rare night of drinking with the boys—a treat she reserves for vacation nights like this trip to Kelowna—but she still managed to maneuver her blanket across the “sandpaper” surface beneath the dancer’s poles.
Whether the customers appreciated the effort or not, no one was willing to part with a bill.
Over the border in Alberta, customers are legally allowed to throw money at the girls, so she would likely earn a few bucks.
She sticks a little target near her belly for guys to hit and says she tries to mix it up by rolling up a poster of herself to play games with the coin toss.
Unless you manage to book an oil town like Fort McMurray though, the jig is pretty much up on the stripping gig, she says.
Internet porn hit live shows hard and there just isn’t the work out there anymore.
It’s a far cry from the 1970s when Noble brought the dancing girls to town.
“People ask me why I did it,” he says from his narrow office in the bowels of the building.
There’s a key-ring kaleidoscope with a pretty brunette in gold tassels inside among the scads of paraphernalia on his desk—the first stripper ever to frequent his establishment.
“Times were tough. Everyone needed entertainment,” he said. “…You get into things and then you have to keep the doors open.”
The Willow is a unionized hotel and he’s proud of the fact he hangs on to employees.
He fostered good relations with the union and individual staff members, helping one buy a house, partnering with the bartender (whom he got to know through a belly flopping contest) in a small embroidery business.
Yet nearly every morning, early in the morning, long past when most would have retired, Noble can be found counting the night’s cash outs before he heads over to the golf course to meet the guys.
“In this place, you’re always counting money,” he says. “Of course, none of its yours.”
This is the plight of a string of owners who have made their fortunes and figured out how not to lose their shirt at the Willow Inn.
Anchoring the town base of Queensway Avenue to the lake at the old Ferry Dock, the Willow has been a fixture in Kelowna since biscuit salesman Herb De Mara took a shine to the city on a business adventure in the early 1900s.
The Willow Inn was the brain child of his wife, Madeline De Mara, who opened the doors on the historic brick building after eyeing up the property from her first business in Kelowna, a boarding house on Bernard Avenue.
Her grandson, 80-year-old Westside resident Bob De Mara, remembers Madeline as a creative taskmaster whose keen business sense matched her staunch character.
The doors closed before she and her husband went to bed and the inn keeper forbid alcohol of any kind on the premises, including in the rooms.
“The hotel was operated like an old country inn—not like today with the strippers and all,” Bob said with a mischievous grin.
“They were tea teatotallers,” he said.
“My father wasn’t though,” he quickly added, “he liked to have a beer.”
Madeline knew her way around the kitchen and how to earn a dollar at a time when married women rarely worked.
It took three mortgages—with rates far beyond what any man in her day would pay—to get the ball rolling on construction, but it didn’t take long for the successful concept to require more rooms.
Designed by her husband, the original building was made of bricks from the Knox Mountain brick factory. She added cottages out the back of the property for permanent borders to stay.
Before long she expanded with a large log-cabin lodge across the street called the Willow Lodge. Beside the lodge was the insurance business her husband and son operated, and beside that a coffee shop where former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm would eventually meet his wife Lillian.
Although Madeline might have seemed an overnight success story, she already knew the ropes of the business world long before the pair showed up on Okanagan Lake.
The De Maras met and married in Ontario and eventually moved to Calgary where Madeline opened two restaurants under the name “Willow”—presumably for the classic China pattern she loved and used in the restaurants and again at the Willow Inn.
It was here keen eye for opportunity the built its popularity, particularly among those looking for a wedding reception or a place to hold teas.
When she eventually sold to Rex and Dorothy McKenzie, the De Mara family moved into the Willow Lodge and built a large home on Harvey Avenue for the remainder of their retirement.
That building became apartments when they left, then was eventually sold it to the city which used it as a museum until it was torn down.
The Willow Inn, however, still had a long and sordid path to follow as the McKenzies would develop their own vision for the place.
The pair were a very young couple in their early twenties when Rex McKenzie’s father arranged for to purchase the hotel for his son to run.
They knew nothing about running a business, nothing about hotels and nothing about the fancy cooking and all the upkeep it would take to run the Willow Inn.
“We were absolutely out of our minds,” said Dorothy, who now lives in a comfortable home in the Mission.
The McKenzies were living in Vancouver as Rex was enrolled at UBC when they were offered the unique proposition by Rex’s father, who wanted his sons’ lives “squared away and settled” as he was not a well man.
Originally, he intended for Rex to take over a farm he had bought for him in Alberta while the young man was overseas in the Air Force.
Rex turned it down saying he wanted to be a teacher, but when presented with the hotel, the pair quickly got on board. “To this day, I have not idea why we did it,” said Dorothy, who has outlived her husband.
The hotel purchase was made during the fall and they were married by December in order to take over on January 1, 1948.
Young and dynamic, the duo would go on to open the first bar in Kelowna after prohibition ended and eventually add a trendy Maude-style lounge in effort to survive the tightfisted ‘50s.
Their plans succeeded well enough to fill the hotel and it became a popular spot to go for an evening drink.
Strange though it may seem today, B.C.’s liquor laws required there be two separate areas in the bar for men and women.
The men could drink on the ladies side, but the women could not venture over to their side of the fence. Then again, just getting the bar in place was tough.
It required a plebiscite and a trip to Victoria where her husband had to sweet talk the powers that be.
“Rex was a natural business man,” said Dorothy, noting he was quiet and honest and definitely his own man.
The couple won the contract to open the Greyhound bus terminal at the side of the building—a move which became a fiery affair.
Long before the backfire of the bikes parked at the door made anyone jump, bombs were going off in The Willow Inn and Greyhound Bus Depot, which had become the target of the breakaway Doukabor sect known as the Sons of Freedom.
The group were known for setting fire to schools and stripping naked to protest constraints the Canadian government placed on their religious beliefs, but Dorothy doesn’t know why they targeted the Willow.
The first bomb was placed in the men’s washroom of the bar and the second in a locker in the bus station at the end of the building.
“By that time we were really getting tired of it,” she remembers, adding they were so thankful no one was hurt.
“The second one was really dangerous. It blew the door of the locker it was in right through the floor of the rooms upstairs.”
The family inside managed to escape, but ultimately the McKenzies would tire of the entire hotel venture.
They sold before Rex was even 40 years- old and he became a well loved and respected math teacher at Kelowna Secondary School. For her part, Dorothy returned to nursing.
“I don’t think anyone even remembers we had anything to do with the Willow,” she said.
People remember Rex, who died in 2003, as a teacher. “He was a very good teacher,” she adds.
Now Dorothy’s memories of the Willow Inn are tucked neatly into a photo album; a watercolour painting by Alex Fong of the hotel hangs on her kitchen wall.
“It was like a family,” she said, filling in the particulars on a pair of sisters who they inherited with the hotel who taught her everything she needed to know.
It’s much the same message Bob De Mara relays and the same way Ken Noble tends to look at it in his days with the inn.
The Willow will close its doors on Sept. 30, although memory of the building will live on in more than a few families throughout the Okanagan Valley.
It is the final countdown for the Willow Inn Hotel. A fixture on Kelowna’s waterfront since 1928, the seedy strip joint is shutting its doors at the end of the month with plans to redevelop the property waiting in the wings. While it may have been known for the motorcycles that line the sidewalk out front, there’s a lot of history living in the old hotel’s walls. Capital News reporter Jennifer Smith takes you through the doors of the notorious inn for a look at where it all came from and how the Willow’s story ends.
By Jennifer Smith
Staff reporter
Sep 09 2007
The Willow Inn’s Sept. 30 closure will end a colourful chapter in Kelowna’s downtown core history
The whisperings at the Willow Inn started with rumours of skyscrapers and a metropolitan real estate deal that included new shops, expensive townhouses and a lakeside boardwalk.
Edmonton-based developer Philip Milroy had seen a fortune beneath the ramshackle stucco of the 79-year-old building, in the holes engineers drilled to test if the silty waterfront could withstand a larger build-out.
His vision for the lot included four towers and a fountain that doubled as an outdoor skating rink during the winter. The plans quickly went public.
Whether the community rejected him or the concept is a matter of opinion, but the hype on Milroy’s Lawson’s Landing deal did not meet with a positive reaction.
Rumour of the plans tore through Kelowna like a windstorm through the old hotel’s namesake, rustling up all kinds of trouble for the wealthy outsider.
The developer argued he was trying to turn over a new leaf for the seedy downtown corner.
The customer base at the inn itself had long since faded into the woodwork, and owner Ken Noble was willing to sell.
“There were too many other bars in town,” Noble said in interview last month.
So Milroy secured an interest in the Willow Inn property and then the plans hit stumbling block after stumbling block, the final blow coming when the federal department of fisheries and oceans rejected the idea of building out into the Okanagan Lake foreshore.
Then three weeks ago, a solution was announced.
Milroy would fund a study to redeveloping a four-block section of the downtown core, including the valuable hotel lots, and that the sale of the Willow Inn could now carry through.
At the end of September, the motorcycles lining Queensway Avenue will fade into the sunset along with the early risers who meet inside for a 9 a.m. beer.
Berate its musty halls. Call it a biker bar if you must, but for Noble and a small community at the end of Queensway Avenue, losing the Willow will mark the end of an era, a lifestyle, and in many cases a good, if hard-earned, living. There are definitely those who, million dollar homes and business opportunities aside, will be sorry to see the notorious inn go.
“It’s like that bar from the TV show; you know, where everyone knows your name and they’re always glad you came,” stripper Adrian Anderson said when asked for an interview on her last tour through the Willow Inn in August.
The petite blond Albertan hit the Willow’s doorstep almost nine years ago, already with a good eight years on the circuit under her belt.
She was treated well, even given one of the hotel’s robes for the week.
“Some places you walk in and everybody feels cold,” she said, recounting stories of bar managers who scream if dancer is a hair late to the stage.
Kelowna’s customer base is anything but lucrative, she said. Her noon-hour show on the Wednesday afternoon she was interviewed drew a slim 30 people, many who preferred a view from the pool tables at the back of the hall.
She was tired after a rare night of drinking with the boys—a treat she reserves for vacation nights like this trip to Kelowna—but she still managed to maneuver her blanket across the “sandpaper” surface beneath the dancer’s poles.
Whether the customers appreciated the effort or not, no one was willing to part with a bill.
Over the border in Alberta, customers are legally allowed to throw money at the girls, so she would likely earn a few bucks.
She sticks a little target near her belly for guys to hit and says she tries to mix it up by rolling up a poster of herself to play games with the coin toss.
Unless you manage to book an oil town like Fort McMurray though, the jig is pretty much up on the stripping gig, she says.
Internet porn hit live shows hard and there just isn’t the work out there anymore.
It’s a far cry from the 1970s when Noble brought the dancing girls to town.
“People ask me why I did it,” he says from his narrow office in the bowels of the building.
There’s a key-ring kaleidoscope with a pretty brunette in gold tassels inside among the scads of paraphernalia on his desk—the first stripper ever to frequent his establishment.
“Times were tough. Everyone needed entertainment,” he said. “…You get into things and then you have to keep the doors open.”
The Willow is a unionized hotel and he’s proud of the fact he hangs on to employees.
He fostered good relations with the union and individual staff members, helping one buy a house, partnering with the bartender (whom he got to know through a belly flopping contest) in a small embroidery business.
Yet nearly every morning, early in the morning, long past when most would have retired, Noble can be found counting the night’s cash outs before he heads over to the golf course to meet the guys.
“In this place, you’re always counting money,” he says. “Of course, none of its yours.”
This is the plight of a string of owners who have made their fortunes and figured out how not to lose their shirt at the Willow Inn.
Anchoring the town base of Queensway Avenue to the lake at the old Ferry Dock, the Willow has been a fixture in Kelowna since biscuit salesman Herb De Mara took a shine to the city on a business adventure in the early 1900s.
The Willow Inn was the brain child of his wife, Madeline De Mara, who opened the doors on the historic brick building after eyeing up the property from her first business in Kelowna, a boarding house on Bernard Avenue.
Her grandson, 80-year-old Westside resident Bob De Mara, remembers Madeline as a creative taskmaster whose keen business sense matched her staunch character.
The doors closed before she and her husband went to bed and the inn keeper forbid alcohol of any kind on the premises, including in the rooms.
“The hotel was operated like an old country inn—not like today with the strippers and all,” Bob said with a mischievous grin.
“They were tea teatotallers,” he said.
“My father wasn’t though,” he quickly added, “he liked to have a beer.”
Madeline knew her way around the kitchen and how to earn a dollar at a time when married women rarely worked.
It took three mortgages—with rates far beyond what any man in her day would pay—to get the ball rolling on construction, but it didn’t take long for the successful concept to require more rooms.
Designed by her husband, the original building was made of bricks from the Knox Mountain brick factory. She added cottages out the back of the property for permanent borders to stay.
Before long she expanded with a large log-cabin lodge across the street called the Willow Lodge. Beside the lodge was the insurance business her husband and son operated, and beside that a coffee shop where former B.C. premier Bill Vander Zalm would eventually meet his wife Lillian.
Although Madeline might have seemed an overnight success story, she already knew the ropes of the business world long before the pair showed up on Okanagan Lake.
The De Maras met and married in Ontario and eventually moved to Calgary where Madeline opened two restaurants under the name “Willow”—presumably for the classic China pattern she loved and used in the restaurants and again at the Willow Inn.
It was here keen eye for opportunity the built its popularity, particularly among those looking for a wedding reception or a place to hold teas.
When she eventually sold to Rex and Dorothy McKenzie, the De Mara family moved into the Willow Lodge and built a large home on Harvey Avenue for the remainder of their retirement.
That building became apartments when they left, then was eventually sold it to the city which used it as a museum until it was torn down.
The Willow Inn, however, still had a long and sordid path to follow as the McKenzies would develop their own vision for the place.
The pair were a very young couple in their early twenties when Rex McKenzie’s father arranged for to purchase the hotel for his son to run.
They knew nothing about running a business, nothing about hotels and nothing about the fancy cooking and all the upkeep it would take to run the Willow Inn.
“We were absolutely out of our minds,” said Dorothy, who now lives in a comfortable home in the Mission.
The McKenzies were living in Vancouver as Rex was enrolled at UBC when they were offered the unique proposition by Rex’s father, who wanted his sons’ lives “squared away and settled” as he was not a well man.
Originally, he intended for Rex to take over a farm he had bought for him in Alberta while the young man was overseas in the Air Force.
Rex turned it down saying he wanted to be a teacher, but when presented with the hotel, the pair quickly got on board. “To this day, I have not idea why we did it,” said Dorothy, who has outlived her husband.
The hotel purchase was made during the fall and they were married by December in order to take over on January 1, 1948.
Young and dynamic, the duo would go on to open the first bar in Kelowna after prohibition ended and eventually add a trendy Maude-style lounge in effort to survive the tightfisted ‘50s.
Their plans succeeded well enough to fill the hotel and it became a popular spot to go for an evening drink.
Strange though it may seem today, B.C.’s liquor laws required there be two separate areas in the bar for men and women.
The men could drink on the ladies side, but the women could not venture over to their side of the fence. Then again, just getting the bar in place was tough.
It required a plebiscite and a trip to Victoria where her husband had to sweet talk the powers that be.
“Rex was a natural business man,” said Dorothy, noting he was quiet and honest and definitely his own man.
The couple won the contract to open the Greyhound bus terminal at the side of the building—a move which became a fiery affair.
Long before the backfire of the bikes parked at the door made anyone jump, bombs were going off in The Willow Inn and Greyhound Bus Depot, which had become the target of the breakaway Doukabor sect known as the Sons of Freedom.
The group were known for setting fire to schools and stripping naked to protest constraints the Canadian government placed on their religious beliefs, but Dorothy doesn’t know why they targeted the Willow.
The first bomb was placed in the men’s washroom of the bar and the second in a locker in the bus station at the end of the building.
“By that time we were really getting tired of it,” she remembers, adding they were so thankful no one was hurt.
“The second one was really dangerous. It blew the door of the locker it was in right through the floor of the rooms upstairs.”
The family inside managed to escape, but ultimately the McKenzies would tire of the entire hotel venture.
They sold before Rex was even 40 years- old and he became a well loved and respected math teacher at Kelowna Secondary School. For her part, Dorothy returned to nursing.
“I don’t think anyone even remembers we had anything to do with the Willow,” she said.
People remember Rex, who died in 2003, as a teacher. “He was a very good teacher,” she adds.
Now Dorothy’s memories of the Willow Inn are tucked neatly into a photo album; a watercolour painting by Alex Fong of the hotel hangs on her kitchen wall.
“It was like a family,” she said, filling in the particulars on a pair of sisters who they inherited with the hotel who taught her everything she needed to know.
It’s much the same message Bob De Mara relays and the same way Ken Noble tends to look at it in his days with the inn.
The Willow will close its doors on Sept. 30, although memory of the building will live on in more than a few families throughout the Okanagan Valley.