Vancouver’s Davie St will be closed to traffic from Burrard to Broughton St Saturday, Sep 10, for the second annual Davie Day street fair.
“Davie St will be closed from 9 am for a pancake breakfast,” says BIA executive director Lynn Hellyar. “The licensed bars will extend their patios into the street until 6 pm. Some of the bars are having their own beer gardens. There is just really a whole lot more this year than there was last year,” she says.
Davie St will reopen to traffic around 8 pm.
Hellyar says some of the costs for the event are planned for and covered by the BIA budget while others are picked-up directly by BIA merchants. “A BIA cannot have a debt. It’s part of the mandate from the city,” says Hellyar. “If we did go into debt, we would not exist. They would shut us down.”
Earlier this year, the BIA planned a street festival on the same day as the Pride Parade, even though the Vancouver Pride Society’s (VPS) plans didn’t include a Davie St event and the BIA hadn’t budgeted for one.
The BIA’s plans fell through because there wasn’t enough time left to pull an event together for Pride Day and both the city of Vancouver and the VPS had reservations about simultaneous events along the parade route, at Sunset Beach and on Davie St.
Hellyar says the BIA may plan for something on Pride Day next year, but that even without a specific Davie St Pride event this year, Davie merchants benefitted from Pride traffic.
“I think the street was pretty busy,” she says. “You couldn’t get in anywhere, that’s for sure. I think the merchants must have fared fairly well.”
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