Deidre Keohane (Deirdriu Ni Cheochain) moved into the Birkdale Apartments on West Broadway with her boyfriend Marty Lacroix in 1980.
Birkdale Apartments:
The Birkdale Apartments first appears in the city directories in 1922, and at some point became the Burkdale Apartments on the front of the building. Not long after moving in, 22-year-old Deidre, an art school grad and Marty, a dancer with Paula Ross, took a can of spray paint to the name, replacing Burk with Rat and the Ratdale was born.
“The rats were the pigeons which Marty hated and called them flying rats. All the roommates were artists and contributed to the energy. It was our intention to make onlookers smile. It was a happy creative place,” she says.
No rats lived here:
While there weren’t any rats, there wasn’t any heating either. The Ratdale residents used their art and their sense of humour as a way to cope with rundown rental housing.
Deidre sculpted a big white rat and put it on a ledge above the front porch. She moved out in 1982, but before she did, Deidre unveiled her new creation, a black and white rat riding a vespa.
“The reason I finally left the Ratdale was because it was too male toxic,” she says. “I was probably a rare female creator in a hugely sexist male dominated art scene. I hated “scenes” but I loved the madness of the 80s. Not the hardcore aggressive stuff, I was more of a Siouxsie and the Banshees type.”
Pieta Woolley, whose dad was one of the artists, remembers it smelling like “oil stoves, rotting wood and pastels.”
Kitsilano resident and photographer Gord McCaw developed a fascination for the Ratdale and took several photos over a three-year-period.
Artist Colony:
In the Summer of 1983 Vanguard Magazine (1972-1989) published an article about the building and its artists. “The Ratdale is an anachronous unheated clapboard building on cloyingly commercial West Broadway. In keeping with its revised moniker, the “Burk” was crossed out with black spray paint and “rat” painted over it,” it said. “It became for a time something of a walk-in gallery reminiscent of sixties storefront psychedelic hangouts, advertising to passers-by such offers as “hats stapled on to heads for a fee,” “we pay cash for static cling” and other such mockeries of free enterprise.”
Later someone painted the building with large yellow polka-dots. When the landlord complained, the polka-dots were painted bright blue. Others decorated the exterior with airplane parts and purple clouds.
And there were parties. Lots of parties, including Ratopolis ’80, with live music and film.
Vancouver photographer Lincoln Clarkes remembers going to a farewell party after the eviction letters were sent out and the building’s demise was imminent. “George redesigned the living room with a chainsaw to make the dance floor bigger,” he says. “The bathroom had real lawn turf on the floor with a grow lamp. There was a sign on the front apartment window reading ‘haircuts 100$.’ The entire building was an empty stage or canvas ready for ideas that were beyond limits.”
Just look what we did with the space.
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2 comments on “The Ratdale Apartments on West Broadway”
I absolutely remember this place as I would cycle past it daily on my way to work and sometimes I would stop just to stare at it for a minute or two, the building was a bit of a spectacle but entertaining to look at. I was sad to see it demolished.
Eve – We were there for the ‘Fairly Formal Ball’ when the clouds appeared with the ‘OBLIVILAND’ logo and the black picket fence was still extant. Gord, this is a wonderful photo chronology of the original Ratdale sliding into its demise only a few short years later. Deidre’s and others’ visions live on in this blog post. Perhaps someone will produce a Ken Lum version of this structure as a ‘gallery piece’. The ‘joy’ lives on!