Bob the Builder

Trim, affable, casually spiffy, sometimes frenetic, Bob Rennie is a fifty-two-year-old condo marketer, but that description does not begin to reflect his role or his standing in the city. Chauffeured about in his Audi S8 V-10 or his Bentley, he’s more or less constantly on his BlackBerry, from six in the morning till midnight, saying (or thumbing) things like “I’ll have a word with Rich,” meaning Coleman, the provincial housing minister; or “I’ll see what Francesco thinks,” as in Aquilini, who owns the Canucks and GM Place; or “Jeff’s away till the twelfth,” meaning Wall, the Vancouver photographer whose show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York a couple of years ago earned stellar reviews and whose works sell for a million dollars a pop. Rennie seems to know almost everyone, and almost everyone seems inordinately fond of him.

Rennie made his fortune persuading people to queue up in the rain at 5 a.m. to put down a deposit on the idea of (let’s say) 725 square feet of marble-topped, burnished steel “lifestyle.” People were buying an idea rather than a condo, since the condo they were buying was actually nothing more than a hologram of aspiration shimmering above a muddy hole in the ground. And so it would remain for months, or years, during which time their deposits would be used to complete the project. Rennie Marketing Systems took a cut — as much as $50,000 per unit — and Rennie turned a good chunk of it into a contemporary art collection (some 1,000 pieces) that rivals any in the world and explains his presence on the American Acquisitions Board of the Tate Modern in London, England.

This morning, BlackBerry in hand, wearing a crisp white shirt, black trousers, black and white sneakers, designer specs, and a red hard hat, Rennie is showing me through his makeover of the Wing Sang Building, the oldest in Chinatown. When all is said and done, the Rennie Museum will cost him something like $20 million. (“I’m not really that rich,” he says with a shrug. “I’m all in — this is my life now.”) Besides a home for his offices, the space houses an appointment-only showcase for some prized pieces (which are otherwise kept in an industrial warehouse in South Vancouver). It lets him collaborate with curators around the world to stage exhibits (the first features the work of Palestinian conceptual artist Mona Hatoum, whom he collects). The audacious renovation signals, and will accelerate, the evolution of Chinatown, the next part of the city to be gentrified and resold (with the help, no doubt, of Rennie Marketing Systems). It positions him at the crossroads where business abuts culture, and at the fulcrum of the East-West teeter-totter. And it demonstrates his money-meets-mouth commitment to the arts, in a city where the rich don’t always share his priorities.

“Would you consider what we’re doing here,” he asks slyly, above the din of mitre saws and nail guns, “a challenge to others to participate? A lot of people in this town say, ‘Why put all that money into an art museum? If you have $20 million, why wouldn’t you buy a bigger house?’ You run across that mentality all the time.”

Vancouver is awash in private-jet wealth. Jimmy Pattison, one of the best-heeled men in the country, is the informal head of a local billionaires’ club. But with notable exceptions (including Southam heiress Martha Lou Henley and developer Michael Audain), the moneyed class lacks the cultural IQ you find among the elite in established cities. Mining financier Frank Giustra donated $100 million to the William J. Clinton Foundation, and flies the former US president around the globe in his MD-87, promoting their humanitarian projects (and his own mining concerns); he gives his time and money to Streetohome, the homelessness agency; yet he seems to have little interest in ensuring his hometown has a decent opera company, ballet corps, theatre scene, or art gallery.

“Partly it’s that idea of generational wealth that Will and Ariel Durant talk about in The Lessons of History,” says Tom Cooper of City in Focus. “Vancouver’s rich are still in acquisition mode. It’s the third and fourth generation that starts thinking about endowing a chair or funding the arts or charities. We don’t have Carnegies and Rockefellers here, because the wealthy families are still too busy making money to stop and wonder what to do with it.”

“The problem in this city,” suggests Bob Rennie, “is that people put you on their boards because they want your money, not your energy or your ideas.” He doesn’t single out the decrepit, antiquated Vancouver Art Gallery, but his disdain for the VAG and its director, Kathleen Bartels, is no secret. The securing of a new site and construction of a new VAG seemed assured a couple of years ago, but the site acquisition fell through and major funding has been scarce. “I think they’re going about it the wrong way,” says Rennie. “‘We need the grand gesture: let’s hire a starchitect, let’s make a statement, let’s go for the splashiest exhibition.’ It grows out of a small-town mentality. We have people here who are royalty in the international art world: Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Roy Arden, Brian Jungen. Did you know that Rodney Graham has a major show in Basel this June? But oh no, we couldn’t possibly be good enough to stand on our own merits.”

The Blue Boy

My first memory of Vancouver, as a pubescent kid in the early ’60s: I’m stepping off the plane from Toronto with my father and brother into a foggy evening ripe with sulfurous emissions from the pulp mills along the Fraser River.

We check in to a place on Marine Drive called, oddly, the Blue Boy, after the eighteenth-century Gainsborough portrait that’s cheaply reproduced in the lobby of the motor inn — or maybe it’s not so odd, in a city named after the stern British Royal Navy captain who explored these shores at the end of the eighteenth century. While my brother and I fetch buckets of ice or run riot in the halls or shoot pool in the basement, Dad — employed by a union based in Pittsburgh — conducts business from our room, plotting with a cast of characters out of Damon Runyon, ordering in Chinese food and, at strange hours, arranging for a bottle of rye by asking for “Speedy Delivery.”

I vividly recall, less than half a century ago, picking blueberries and galloping horses just off No. 3 Road in Richmond, then a country byway with open sewage ditches; it’s now a retail mecca of malls, franchise operations, and sleek Mercedes. Downtown, my brother and I were stunned to realize you could step off the curb of the busiest street and all traffic would halt — no crosswalk needed. East Hastings, where Dad took us for seafood at the Only Café, was more gruff pageant than horror show, full of abject loggers and miners and stevedores and what were then called, without apology or embarrassment, drunken Indians. To us highly sophisticated easterners, the place felt like a frontier town.

It’s easy to forget now, a quarter century after Expo 86 introduced the world to Vancouver (and Vancouver to the world), easy to forget after the exodus from Hong Kong in the ’90s altered the city’s demographic profile and fuelled a real estate boom, easy to forget now that Hermès and Coach and Gucci fill our shop windows — and especially easy to forget during the klieg-lit invasion of the Winter Olympics — what a small city this is. With a population of about 600,000, it’s a quarter the size of Toronto proper. Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal, and Ottawa have more citizens. Hell, Mississauga has more. Winnipeg has more. Vancouver’s American analogues are not Chicago and New York, but Charlotte, Memphis, El Paso. Include the metro area, and the population swells to 2.2 million, a third of metropolitan Toronto’s. If this city were an actor, it would acquit itself beautifully in a supporting role — Philip Seymour Hoffman before Capote. If it were a fighter, it would be a middleweight, albeit one so slick and well marketed that you think of it as belonging among the heavyweights — any of which would, in fact, clobber it.