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T̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶o̶n̶k̶ R̶u̶m̶ ̶J̶u̶n̶g̶l̶e̶ Heartbreakers has been sold

T̶h̶e̶ ̶M̶o̶n̶k̶ R̶u̶m̶ ̶J̶u̶n̶g̶l̶e̶ Heartbreakers has been sold

Plus, an old-timey Ford gets stopped by the cops, and is Prince George really on the province's naughty list?

June 06, 2023

B.C. Highway Patrol put out a release yetserday warning people that if you trick out a vintage car, it still needs to be street legal. In this case, someone was driving a heavily-modified 1931 Ford that didn’t have all the necessary safety feature. Looks interesting, though….

The Rum Jungle generation

I think one of the better ways to figure out how old someone is would be to ask them the name of the club on 5th and Dominion. For me it was briefly the Munk but primarily the Rum Jungle where you would get multi-coloured drinks in a fishbowl and the occassional touring rap group would perform. More recently it’s been Heartbreakers and before that it was various other things but I had no idea it was owned by the same folks the whole time — though, not anymore, because:

I actually missed the story about this last year but it was reported in the Prince Geoge Post last July that the owners planned to give it up, but only if they could find the right buyer — and with some great descriptions of the clubs’ many iterations from writer Matt Scace:

You don’t have to look far to see it. The grey brick supports are leftover from the building’s days as The Munk Bar; what’s now a mirror on the second floor is the door through which dancers would enter the stage, a relic of its days as a strip club, Ba-Da-Boom. Zebra print chairs, meanwhile, still hang around from the years it was called Rum Jungle, though the tiger print carpet from that era is long gone.

And, of course, there’s the life-sized knight, still looming above tables on the second floor. Leah Spoletini and her husband, Adriano Spoletini, bought that for $5,000 in 1997 when they opened The Munk Bar.

All that is now up for sale, as Leah and Adriano — owners of Heartbreakers and its four previous iterations over the past 36 years — look to hand over the keys to someone new.

…

The couple have been looking for a buyer for the better part of 10 years. Both the property and business are up for sale, with the landlords handling the sale of the land as they reach retirement age. Everything else, from the zebra print chairs to the disco ball hanging above the dance floor, comes with the sale of the business.

Leah, Adriano and his brother Joe opened Overdrive in 1987 at a time when Prince George had, she recalls, approximately seven nightclubs. They’ve witnessed first-hand a decline in nightclubs’ popularity since then, slowly dwindling to make Heartbreakers the only one left in the city.

“My generation, we drank like crazy,” she said. “(The current) generation is not into doing that.”

It’s a great little profile and I recommend you read the whole thing. Night clubs are not generally my thing these days but I do think it’s important for a city of this size to have at least one and cheers to these folks for ensuring we’ve had at least one for the past decade — and moving forward.

Prince George makes the long list of cities that need to build more housing

Last week the province released a list of ten cities that need to start approving and building more housing or face undefined consequences from the province. Well, yesterday Post Media released a longer list of 47 that includes basically every city in Metro Vancouver and Greater Victoria, as well as Kelowna, Kamloops and Prince George. The headline calls it a “naughty list” but the province says that in actuality these are “areas of the province with the greatest housing need and highest projected growth where targets may be set.”

These municipalities were simply included in the order-in-council for expediency to not have to amend the regulation every time a new cohort is selected,” a ministry spokesperson said by email Sunday. “While these are areas with the highest need and projected growth, it is not a guarantee that targets will be set in each of those municipalities.

The thing about the list of ten is these are cities that both need more housing and that the province has identified as not doing enough about. The longer list is cities that need more housing and the province may need to step in at some point, but not yet. I think that’s worth noting, simply because (as I’ve written before), several Prince George councils have been pretty hands-on about recognizing the need for more housing, zoning for it, and approving most every project unless it was in some major violation of community planning (and, on several occassions, despite opposition from neighbours) and David Eby said as much when he became Premier and identified this plan — so at this point, I’d be surprised to see the city on any sort of ‘naughty list’. Instead, this just seems to be the province acknowleding what has been official city policy for about a decade: The need for more housing, particularly high-density, multi-family and senior-oriented.

Quick news:

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