Rejuvenating the West End

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This article was published 28/04/2015 (4004 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The West End has quietly received a boost from new ownership of the old Ellice Café and Theatre but Jeremy Torrie has bigger plans and dreams.

“We’d like to see a new district here. In 10 years, we’d like to see it be like Corydon,” said the local filmmaker and president of Bandwidth Digital Releasing ltd.

“We’re across the street from the West End Cultural Centre and the University of Winnipeg is just a few blocks away. The U of W is doing a lot of right things downtown. We had been looking for a building to call our own. I’ve had my eye on it for quite awhile.”

Torrie and a group of investors, including Winnipeg-raised Hollywood actor Adam Beach, purchased the property at 585 and 587 Ellice Ave. from New Life Ministries last summer for $400,000. They are putting another $100,000 into renovations in the hopes of creating a social cornerstone for the neighbourhood.

They have also spent $85,000 in upgrades to the theatre side with state-of-the-art digital cinema equipment, including a new projector, surround-sound speakers and a new eight-metre-wide cinemascope screen.

Since it reopened late last year, a number of events, including the Winnipeg Aboriginal Film Festival, have been held in the more than century-old venue, which has been renamed The Bandwidth Theatre.

Things are going to get busier this summer when the newly-named Feast Café Bistro opens its doors. The plan for Feast is to have an aboriginal focus, serving traditional and indigenous foods, with a bakery and a small retail section selling house-made jams, sauces and honey. There are even plans to offer cooking classes.

Another owner, Christa Bruneau-Guenther, will oversee that side of the operation.

“In our aboriginal culture, ‘feast’ means a celebration, sharing, community, wholeness and bringing people together. This is what we will strive to be for our patrons. Even if you are just having a coffee and a muffin, it’s still a feast to us,” she said.

Even though the café and the theatre are in the same building, they’ve always had separate entrances. That won’t be a problem anymore.

“We’re going to put a hole in the wall so we can join the two together so people can enjoy a dinner and a movie,” Torrie said.

He would like the facility to become the West End’s answer to the Park Theatre, which hosted about 300 entertainment events last year. The Bandwidth Theatre has a capacity of 255.

Unlike the previous incarnation, the new café and theatre will serve liquor. If its licence can get approved before the weekend, Torrie said he’d like to show the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao boxing fight on Saturday.

There is one other source of revenue for the investors — four suites above the café have been rented out.

“It’s a really good business model for us,” he said.

The Ellice Café was founded 10 years ago by late inner-city minister and activist Harry Lehotsky. The theatre — which operated as the Mac’s Theatre from 1913 until the late 1960s and later as the art house Cinema 3 — opened a few months later.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca