The Pear Tree Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Laurel Packinghouse’

The days are growing longer and warmer, and to celebrate we at the Pear Tree House have been getting out of the house more. Whether it’s a trip to the park near our house or our little back yard, the fresh air and sunshine have been luring us out. We’ve been running, strolling, climbing, chasing, crawling and, on the rare occasion, just sitting still and soaking it all in.

Indoors, we’ve been preparing ourselves, mentally, for the Big Clean, where we dust off the proverbial cobwebs, polish up the windows to let the aforementioned sun in and re-arrange the furnishings a little to keep things fresh.

We’re also continuing to tweek the Pear Tree website – a task that, like keeping a house, never seems to end, and always evolves to keep things interesting.

If you haven’t yet noticed on the sidebar to the right, we also welcome a new sponsor this month: Kelowna Museums. Please check out their site by clicking on the button. There is a schedule for current and upcoming events, which includes the Neighbourhood Nosh, a free wine tasting event held the first Thursday of the month (including tonight) from 4-6 p.m. at the B.C. Wine Museum and VQA Wine Shop. While work continues on The Laurel Packinghouse, the B.C. Wine Museum and Neighbourhood Nosh is located behind the heritage building, on Ellis Street.

In the mean time, we’ve got a line-up of tantalizing spring inspirations for you to check out this month, on the main site as well as the blog – so keep on checking back!

And how are you welcoming spring?

I love old buildings. Even ones that lean towards dilapidated pull just a little on my heart strings when I see them slated for demolition. While I am a fan of old school architecture, that’s not their only appeal. I’m fascinated by their stories – and the older they are, the more stories they hold inside of them.

Not all the stories are sensational, and they don’t have to be. Like I’ve said before on this blog, the most treasured memories in life don’t always show themselves to be spectacular at the time. It isn’t until months or years later that they bob to the surface of our hearts and take hold of us as something outstanding.

While a building is, supposedly, inanimate, I am quite convinced that they absorb, in their walls and floors and structure, all the stories that happened there. Whether it’s the love and determination of a business owner to make their business work or the laughter, conversation or sometimes even tears that are shared inside it, they’re all there, inhabiting the space like ghosts that never show themselves but quietly reside.

It is for that reason that I was excited to hear about the call from Kelowna Museums for stories about the Laurel Packinghouse. Known alternatively as The Laurel Building and The Packinghouse, the old brick building dates back to 1917. It was built from bricks made from Knox Mountain clay, and  operated as a packinghouse into the 1970s. Plans for its destruction were thwarted in 1982 when the Kelowna Museums Society made it the first designated heritage building in Kelowna.

Since then, the stories that have unfolded in the old place have been myriad, from Okanagan Wine Festival events to weddings, conferences and intimate concert performances. For the last several years, the upstairs has housed offices – mostly (but not exclusively) for arts related organizations. It has become, I would argue, a cornerstone of culture in the Central Okanagan.

My earliest memory of The Laurel involves auditioning for some kind of low budget (who knows if it even happened?) movie back in 1986. My mom let me skip school for the day and me and two friends headed down for what we thought would be our big break. The “casting agents” were cloistered in a room that is now the Orchard Industry Museum, and we sat in the lobby (I guess it was) for at least three hours waiting to get in. The parts we were trying for were advertised for women over the age of 18. Despite falling a few years below the mark we were sure we would be convincing enough to inspire them to pick us anyway. Looking back at pictures of myself now at that age, I see that quite the contrary was true and I actually looked about three years younger. We were the only ones who turned out for the audition, along with two completely strung out girls who had us in stitches the whole time, regaling us with their tales of hitch hiking adventures and other vignettes from their wild and wacky lives. When the guys in the room finally humoured us by letting us in, I was asked, for my audition part, to pretend to convince a police officer not to give me a speeding ticket. Not yet of driving age, I faltered and, yes, failed. Obviously, I never did become a movie star. But a piece of me – a yellowed memory – still lives in the old building, alongside the throngs of other people and their stories.

I’ll be watching this blog for other stories, memories shared, from this landmark building. I’m so glad that, as they renovate and restore the place they are finding a way to keep the old spirit alive.