Last Resort
John Moore looks for the real Whistler
Exiting Whistler’s then-new Brewhouse a few years ago, I ambled out
a different door than I’d entered and into a paranoid nightmare. In
the fading evening light, I blundered through a few immaculately Dutch-paved
galleries and courtyards before realizing I was lost. If I’d had soap-opera
amnesia, I’d still have known I was in Whistler from all the sweatshirt
logos in the gift-shop windows. I just didn’t know where in Whistler,
or which direction led back to my car. Anywhere on the Village Stroll in
the original townsite, I’d have trusted gravity and my liver’s
compass to lead me to Tapley’s Pub. But Whistler had sprouted a joined-at-the-overpass
Siamese twin on the northwest side of Village Gate Boulevard, and I was
on the unfamiliar side of town.
Yet it was all too familiar. Not in the comforting sense, but with the disconcerting edginess of a déjà-vu experience or anxiety dream. Buildings hemming the maze looked exactly like those in the original town—a kind of generic Swiss-Tyrolean set Ralph Lauren would concoct for an après-skiwear ad. Asymmetrical walks designed to provide non-threatening novelty and casual delight to daytime strollers appeared surreally warped and deserted, as vaguely sinister as a De Chirico painting.
In the 1960s British television series, The Prisoner, a rogue secret agent is drugged and imprisoned in The Village, a themed seaside community whose twee design seems inspired by Noddy books and Beatrix Potter illustrations. Escapees are pursued along the beach and smothered by huge animated balloons like giant condoms. The machinery of repression is run by a changing cast, all of whom call themselves Number Two and inform the agent, played by Patrick McGoohan: “I am Number Two. You are Number Six.”
McGoohan’s signature line, “I am not a number! I am a free man!” was in the boarding lounge of my Scream Express when a guy wandered into the square and kindly led me out of the labyrinth. In a parking lot filled with acres of nearly identical cars, I immediately knew where to find mine. No giant condom pursued me, but I looked over my shoulder until I was well out of town.
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In the November 12, 2004, issue of Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine, editor Bob Barnett reported on a meeting of Tourism Whistler members as they opened a black-bordered telegram: the results of a visitor survey conducted over the last year. It was meant to explain what nervous local gossip had already established: Two consecutive years of falling visitor numbers, empty rooms, and continuing high overheads had resulted in business failures, with some merchants pulling out of the Village instead of fighting to get in. A whopping 35 percent of visitors surveyed said they would not come back to Whistler because it is too expensive. The Ski Club of Great Britain complained that prices in Whistler are ridiculously high. American visits had dropped by more than 16 percent. A lack of family friendly activities came up, as did poor front-desk service due to multiple property managers involved in time-share condo bookings.
In a qualifying heat for the Gold Medal for Understatement, Diana Lyons of the Delta Village Suites commented that Whistler “doesn’t Google well” with keywords like “budget,” “moderate” and “affordable.” Resort operators know people spend more freely on holidays than they do at home, but they are at home when they check their visa bill and find they paid more than $12 for a cheeseburger. And people who have money do check their bills closely, knowing that every two-bit pimp with a marketing degree sees them as cash cows to be milked.
“Some of the issues are as much about perception as reality, but in tourism as in politics, perception often is reality,” Barnett observed astutely. Strolling through the expensively crafted lodge ambiance of the expanding Village, the monotonous repetition of bar, bistro, boutique and gift shop creates an impression not unlike downtown Reno, notorious for placing Keno boards even above urinals. The notion that Whistler Village is just an outdoor mall designed to make you walk past as many retailers as possible in the process of getting anywhere, aiming to relieve you of large amounts of your disposable income along the way, is inescapable.
Barnett’s observation about perception cuts deeper than predictable gripes about high prices and indifferent service. Whistler is so artificially contrived to make money that it actually sends a visual message at odds with its purpose. Lots of nice people live in Whistler (it has one of the most active and talented writers’ groups in the province), but the public face of the place is the Village. It provokes mixed reactions in many visitors, not just because it seems determined to remind you that you can’t really afford—and thus don’t deserve—to be there, but also because it’s so conspicuously not a real town. If Whistler can’t resolve this fundamental perceptual ambivalence, the 2010 Olympics could be the event that turns it into a ghost-condo complex as sad as the many BC mining-bonanza towns that were briefly the biggest and richest cities north of Chicago or San Francisco.
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In the 1960s, The Prisoner’s Village (an actual resort in Wales) was on the cutting edge of “resort architecture,” which has been around as a distinct genre since Roman emperors built luxurious casual getaway villas on the isle of Capri. Previously, wealthy Romans had maintained comfortable agricultural estates, to which they retired in summer to play at farming and commune with their redneck roots. The imperial fad for seaside villas caused many to fatally opt for the balmy charms of Pompeii and Herculaneum—the West Palm Beaches of their time, where volcanoes instead of hurricanes were apt to suddenly depress property values. Resort architecture has always been a whore to great wealth; witness the Long Island mansions ludicrously described as “summer houses” by New York social-register types in the early 1900s.
Amusement parks like Brighton Pier, Coney Island midway, Disneyland/DisneyWorld, and today’s themed Las Vegas casinos, are just carnival imitations of the grand casinos and spas of Europe’s imperial 19th century. Their overblown glitter is meant to dazzle the working and middle classes, but at least they’re inclusionist. Since Roman times, the consistent characteristic of true resort architecture has been the ironically expensive fabrication, not of grandeur, but of an idealized, simpler, more “authentic” lifestyle. So while most of us quease at the current million-plus and multi-million-dollar prices of a cabin in the woods in Whistler, our shock is either very naïve or as faked as a first-date orgasm. Despite its pretensions to simplicity, resort architecture remains fundamentally elitist and exclusionist.
Nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrants brought the winter pastime of sliding down snow slopes on wooden slats to North America, which had plenty of mountains and nothing else to do with them, yet skiing only became fashionable here in the 1950s. Wooden skis with non-release suicide bindings, rope tows and T-Bar lifts required dedication that made the sport a hard sell. Anyone who has experienced the invigorating effects of hypothermia, frostbite, windburn and glare-blindness knows that it has never really been about skiing. It’s about lounging in loud sweaters and tight pants around rock fireplaces in rustic lodges, nibbling snacks whose main ingredient is melted cheese, sipping coffee drinks spiked with pungent liqueurs, and the delicious friction of snow-tanned flesh under feather quilts. Once the American royalty of Hollywood stars like Gary Cooper was photographed frolicking on Aspen and Sun Valley slopes in unattractive wool clothing, the future of skiing—and ski resorts—was assured.
By the early ’70s, pseudo-sophisticates summed up this lifestyle with the borrowed French phrase après-ski, or, more pretentiously, just après. People were seriously using it a propos of Whistler when the future townsite was an open-pit garbage buffet for bears, the only bar was the grotty Ski Boot pub, and most “residents” lived at Whistler lift-base in a squatters camp of old trailers connected by tarps known as The Ghetto, whose pre-typhoid mood had a long mogul-row to go before Gstaad or St. Moritz would feel threatened. It took 30 years, but the faith of early visionaries like Franz Wilhelmsen was vindicated in 2001, when Vancouver beat out venerable Salzburg’s bid for the 2010 Winter Games.
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Pioneer promoters may have been a tad naïve to think that treating an IOC scout to pitchers of draft at the Boot and some leg-wrestling with a 22-year-old ex-Laurentian ski bunny in the back of a rusty VW van would clinch an Olympic bid in the late 1960s. Hobbled by the total lack of site infrastructure and 130 kilometers of road that looked like it had been laid out by an Irish surveyor on his way home from the pub, they enlisted the star quality of Canadian Olympic ski champion Nancy Greene and coach/husband Al Raine to get the attention of the provincial government.
In 1975, the Resort Municipality of Whistler was created to market the snow and après for all they were worth. A cabal of shills who formed one of the first councils disgraced itself by spending more money than it collected from speculative land sales, an act of fiscal nonchalance theoretically punishable by criminal charges under the Municipal Act. The province made a controversial decision to bail out the bankrupt municipality at BC taxpayers’ expense and replace the councillors with ones who could add and subtract from something bigger than a bar tab.
Having twigged that being Bürgermeisters is only fun if you have an actual Burg to meister, early councils acquired a “town” to forestall IOC quibbling that there wasn’t anything at Whistler but mountains. To the ongoing discomfiture of the local bruin population, a Village of Whistler was erected on the site of the former trash pit. When existing distressed working towns are gentrified into resorts, elements of authenticity are preserved at grid-level and through restoration, such as in many Swiss and Tyrolean farming hamlets that have become skiing destinations. Whistler’s instant alpine village looked more like something pre-fabbed by schnapps-maddened elves in the Ikea Hall of the Mountain King, flat-shipped for assembly, marked one clock tower, ten rustic inns, one dozen quaint shops. Insert tabs A into slots B.
The German word gemütlich is often translated as “cozy.” It describes a home, restaurant or inn whose occupants are congenial, as well as a style of bourgeois décor that may be rustic, but not rough. In Swiss and Bavarian villages, it’s a by-product of long occupation by people who indulge their artistic side in the ornamentation of the practical. Faked, it means lots of non-structural laminated beams, cultured stone, and cowbells and cuckoo clocks and rosemaling on everything until you hork up your Sachertorte. Germans also have a word for this: kitsch. Hitler loved it. Top Nazi goons had a compound in the mountains above Berchtesgaden done up in ersatz-alpen style, where they could drag up in loden and lederhosen with their dirndl-skirted consorts and pretend to be heroic woodcutters from Grimm’s fairy tales instead of the big bad wolves they were.
Like other ski resorts, Whistler bought into the generic ersatz-alpen design concept. One of the inherent kinks of resort architecture is the perceived necessity of maintaining a thematic fantasy, which discourages experimentation and natural evolution in the built environment. In Whistler, maintaining the dubious integrity of the monotonous, international “alpine” design theme is the job of municipal planners and the Advisory Planning Commission made up of volunteers from the community. Officially, their mission is to work with developers to facilitate the adoption of building designs and façades that will meet with the approval of council and result in the swift granting of permits ... blah blah. Really they’re the Alpengeist Gestapo whose agenda is to prevent pop stars and other vulgar rich types from building pink Parthenon-inspired stucco villas, or Trumpish developers from erecting garish hotels with inappropriate Taj Mahal or Chinese pagoda themes. They’re backed up by toothy bylaws that even regulate signage, especially the neon signatures of national and transnational retail and fast-food chains, most of whom have successfully been prevented from lowering Whistler’s tone.
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Whistler’s insistence on controlling building height, appearance and signage is not necessarily a bad thing. Would to god more BC municipalities exercised their legitimate right to decide how their towns look. Halfway to Whistler, the traditional business district of Squamish has been gutted by highway-hell strip malls, where certain companies have been allowed to drop characterless corporate units onto highly visible sites—with hardly a squeak of protest from local politicians for fear of annulling the supposed mystic marriage of investment and jobs. While Squamish wags its tail in the air to show it’s anycorporatebody’s bitch, Whistler growls like a chained St. Bernard that has slurped its brandy cask and lives to chew the legs off anybody not in designer skiwear.
The business end of the chain is held by Intrawest. Anytime there’s a pissing contest in Whistler, Intrawest makes the biggest yellow hole in the snow. Originally an urban real-estate development company, in 1986 Intrawest bought the Blackcomb Mountain operation and married it to Whistler operations shortly thereafter. Recognizing that the resort industry is a jackpot fattened by Baby Boomers—the wealthiest and most numerous generation of North American consumers—in 1994 the company shucked its urban interests to concentrate on acquiring and marketing upscale resort properties, especially ski resorts. In a mere decade, Intrawest has bought or become the major player in the dozen most prominent ski resorts in North America, as well as entering partnerships with several established European ski resorts. By its own admission, a cornerstone of Intrawest’s policy is the pseudo-quaint alpine-themed “pedestrian village” meant to “enhance the resort experience”—and maximize the extraction of visitor dollars off the slopes as well as on.
Intrawest’s genius is that it knew from the get-go it wasn’t in the ski-lift racket; it was in the fully packaged lifestyle-resort business. One of the cardinal rules of industry is never to let the mill be idle. Accordingly, Intrawest has systematically transformed its alpine resorts into year-round destinations, integrating golf, eco- and adventure tourism—anything that will keep its Club Intrawest hotel rooms and high-end private condos booked. This diversified, all-season marketing plan also cannily recognizes that Boomers who made après a marketable lifestyle aren’t going to ride moguls or deep powder on Zimmer-framed skis. Around 2010, year of the Big Olympic Bonus, Boomers who built the business will start hanging up their slats and turning to low-impact activities, where the chances of simultaneously catching pneumonia and breaking a hip are slimmer.
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Like the smaller retailers and restaurants, Intrawest and the big hotel chains that are heavily invested in Whistler real estate depend on the minimum-wage krill who cling to the bottom links of the resort food chain for tips or the perk of a season ski pass. These are the people who interact with visitors face to face, making or breaking the bubble blown by the resort architects. In the wake of the Tourism Whistler survey, staff all over Whistler are no doubt undergoing compulsory, inquisitional service-motivation seminars—middle managers’ instinctive ass-covering response to negative client input. But it’s delusional to blame staff for Whistler’s service failures, at any level. These people work in a town that makes it very clear their presence is tolerated only because somebody has to serve and clean up after le grande luxe.
As a 10-year observer of Whistler politics, I’ve watched several councils elected, each promising to address the issue of affordable staff housing—i.e. housing that doesn’t involve sharing with 16 other people and sleeping in shifts while the off-shift parties on around you. Despite the municipality’s 300-odd acres of assorted Crown land, basically given to the resort over the years to provide employee housing, every proposed staff-housing initiative has foundered. This is because absentee millionaires petition council in aggrieved tones, protesting that they’re in favour of staff housing, just Not In My Back Yard. They raise the dread spectre of million-dollar equity eroded by proximity to ghetto dorms infested with inebriated Aussie lefties, who are likely to stage pick-up-a-longneck-with-your-asshole contests within sight or hearing of sybaritic chalets and cedar-decked hot tubs.
At the bottom of the same page as Barnett’s November 12 Pique editorial, a real-estate ad offered “Whistler’s Best Priced Single Family Home”: a vaguely Swiss three bedroom plus loft, with a one-bedroom suite rentable to half a dozen shifties, priced at $765,000.00. In the real world, current housing-price stats indicate that you could buy an average house in Vancouver and one in Toronto for that stake. The perception is that people who own Whistler would prefer that people who work there simply get out of town when not required to carry ski bags, frap cinos, pour shooters, bus tables, or mop up the vomited excess of living large. In fantasy WhistlerWorld, workers live in Squamish or Pemberton. Never mind that, for people making minimum wage, having to buy, insure and fuel a beater to drive 30 to 40 kilometres to work every day is a financial burden proportionally more punitive than the lease payments on a new Ford Expedition.
Whistler is crowing because its annual cattle call, the fall Job Fair, attracted lineups this year—in contrast to a couple of previous seasons where help was hard to get for the first time in decades. Whoopee is premature, since incoming staff will quickly become as cynical and demoralized as veterans by the economic realities of serving in Heaven. Working for a ski pass, most will join the underclass of a deeply polarized community, working weekends when tourists and rich owners clog the slopes and skiing or boarding weekdays when they have the snow mostly to themselves. Ironically, the people who make the greatest use of what is supposed to be the community’s primary asset are the workers who can’t afford to live there.
The future of Whistler as a community ultimately depends on people who work and live there, but a 30 percent jump in real-estate values in the Sea to Sky corridor following the acceptance of Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic bid has made home ownership problematic for non-transient working people. Last year, building lots went on sale in Britannia Beach, 10 kilometres south of Squamish, for just under $200,000 and sold out in 24 hours, despite the toxic legacy of the giant abandoned copper mine. From Lions Bay to Squamish, the mephitic stench of pulp mills has been replaced by the smell of greed. Prices in Pemberton have gone ballistic, and in Whistler itself, that three-quarter of a million tag for a single-family home actually looks like a bargain.
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Dogs are in the manger, already snarling over “legacies” of an Olympics six years hence. In Vancouver, venues have been relocated, pitting one metro municipality against another. Squamish is squealing about being pushed off the teat because the official Vancouver 2010 committee has threatened legal action over the town’s “Heart of 2010” slogan, as well as a contractor’s use of the name “Olympic Valley,” and a local woman’s sale of a related Internet domain name to a German pornographer. In the November 18 Pique, Whistler filed final notice of application to extend its municipal boundaries south to Brandy-wine Provincial Park—a move to establish a green bulwark against carny hustlers who might otherwise erect tacky mini-golf courses or reptile ranches on the resort’s doorstep. The biggest legacy of all—multi-million-dollar improvements to the Sea-to-Sky Highway—is well on the way to giving all BC taxpayers grief in a place that may still be sore from the original Whistler bailout.
While Tourism Whistler members conduct staff purges and the Resort Municipality annexes additional Lebensraum to buffer the illusion of WhistlerWorld, solutions to the fundamental problem of Whistler’s perceived inauthenticity as a community are belatedly being sought. Over-budget and overdue, Volume 1 of the Comprehensive Sustainability Plan, a 42-page writ that took three years to write, was adopted by the municipality in December and grandly renamed Whistler 2020—Moving to a Sustainable Future. Wrapping itself in the “sustainability” flag is a smart PR move, and the municipality is taking the lead by adopting LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for public buildings. In December, Whistler received its first LEED certificate in recognition of the “green building” practices used in the Spring Creek Fire Hall. Alas, real “20/20” vision also sees people building chalets that use multiple old-growth cedar trunks as decorative columns to support decks and verandahs—a design flourish that sends a decidedly different environmental message.
One thing the CSP got right was to kibosh the idea of a separate residential community 17 kilometres south in the Callaghan Valley, once touted as a possible Olympic athletes’ village and future employee-housing site—an option that would create a de facto workers ghetto excluded from the community. The other hopeful glimmer is the municipality’s 11th-hour hire of Whistler Housing Authority veteran Steve Bayly as a “housing expediter.” Bayly has been given a scant year to cure a rash that has been chafing Whistler’s crotch for a decade. When his contract ends, he’ll have to take up bomb disposal or test-driving Ferraris to relax after his stint of trying to balance the interests of workers, corporate stakeholders and NIMBY millionaires.
Bayly has one ace in his fanny pack. He was involved in the original design of Whistler’s business/industrial park, Function Junction, at the present main entrance to the municipality, 6 kilometres south of the Village. Just off Highway 99 and screened by firs, it’s basically one long street flanked by rectangular, pre-engineered buildings whose design is industrial or at least primarily “functional.” No glue-lam beams or mock rock. Visually, the effect is reminiscent of Main Street in an Old West film set, but there are hardware stores, furniture stores, a car dealership, the relaxed Millar Creek Cafe, even a barbershop. All Function Junction lacks is a local grocery/pharmacy General Store and a pub to become the nucleus of a real community.
Hemmed by escarpments to the west and the Millar Creek wetlands to the northwest, Function Junction has one logical way to expand. Instead of chipping away at Garibaldi Provincial Park to extend ski areas fewer people are going to use in coming decades, Whistler could co-opt the Interpretive Forest directly across the highway from Function Junction as the site for affordable housing for staff and the resident working population. A basic road network exists, and the land is mostly flat (by BC standards) all the way to the backyard park of Cheakamus Lake. Permanent and transient working people would have a community tastefully tree-screened from the highway to avoid offending the sensibilities of visiting millionaires, with a real town centre within walking distance. Whistler Transit already runs buses between Function Junction and the official Village. It’s a minimum effort, no-brainer, win-win solution that could create an organically viable, authentic town. In the long run, that would be an Olympic legacy worth having.
Copyright © John Moore, 2005