Take Your Time Back and the fight for Vancouver community music venues

Last week, East Vancouver all-ages venue Take Your Time Back announced it would be shutting down its live music shows as of March 22.

Stating in an Instagram post that they had been “confronted by the city,” the collective held a festival this past weekend to mark the end of what has been a vital creative space for emerging artists and musicians, many of whom played their very first shows there.

The announcement comes amidst other venue pressures and shutdowns in Vancouver, in part due to factors like rising rents, neighbourhood gentrification, a citywide crackdown on unlicensed venues and events as reported by the Lookout,  and enhanced inspections led by Vancouver Fire Rescue Services and the Vancouver Police Department.

Take Your Time Back had taken over the space from an organization called 648 Kingsway (which is also the venue’s address), who shut their doors in August of 2024 due to an upcoming 40 per cent rent increase. For more than a decade prior to that, the space was run by a group called the Toast Collective, who also cited increasing rent as a reason for their own shutdown in 2021.

“They have been a venue for over 15 years, and there's already an audience and a community, so we wanted to take over that space and keep nurturing that community,” says Anne D., who co-founded the collective with partners Luis Carlos Gonzalez and Dayton Bowen. “It just naturally became a live music space because it's always been that way.”

The collective made the decision to shut the venue space down pre-emptively after their landlord was contacted by a city inspector after receiving an anonymous complaint.

The 112-year-old building had also not been renovated in more than a decade and was in “pretty poor condition,” says Anne, adding that “the space was not going to last forever.” 

However, for some in the Vancouver music community, the announcement still came as a surprise.

“It was a big shock for a lot of people,” says musician Joe Baker, who has lived in Vancouver for 27 years and last month played a show at Take Your Time Back with his band Ghost Teeth.

It was a welcoming and vital social space, especially for bands that were just starting out, and occupied a particular niche in the venue ecosystem of Vancouver, he says.

“There needs to be more room for people coming to a space and allowing themselves to kind of forget their troubles for a night and just connect with people,” he says. “A big part of that is cost, because Take Your Time Back has a ‘pay what you can’ system. So, they have a door, they have a set price. They recommend you pay, but they're not going to turn anybody away if they don't have money.”

The collective ran under anarchist principles, and were not motivated by profit when it came to who they booked in the venue.

“A lot of the crowd we have is younger people. They cannot afford to go to very expensive shows. There's a lot of 19-plus shows that they cannot attend, so we’ve got to provide a space for that,” says Anne. “We're trying to get a chance for these people to get their art out there.”

This model worked well for musicians like Chris Kitto, who moved to Vancouver two years ago. He says the trajectory for new performers is typically to start with house shows, move into small venues like Take Your Time Back, and then move on to bigger independent venues like Green Auto and Red Gate.

“Vancouver is one of the only cities where you can slowly work your way up. It feels like in other cities, you have to already be breaking through, whereas in Vancouver, you can slowly work up with entry-level venues,” he says.

This was what made Take Your Time Back so crucial for new artists, they were easy and cheap to book, and didn’t charge the deposit fees that a lot of other venues did, says Kitto.

“They were like friends to us,” he says. “It just felt like this real community space — more than just a venue.”

After more than a decade of loving and losing Vancouver-area venues, music enthusiast Kristina Rothstein decided to document many of these spaces in what became a podcast series called In Search of Lost Venues.

In each episode, she wanders around Vancouver neighbourhoods with musicians to visit their favourite now-shuttered establishments and document the memories and nostalgia that emerge. For her, that venue was The Sugar Refinery, a late ’90s-era vegetarian restaurant and music space at 1115 Granville Street.

“I would think a lot about what that place was for other people. And so I think that's why I wanted to investigate and walk around and see how it felt for everyone else,” she says.

When a community space like that is lost, it can be jarring because people often just expect things to always be there, says Rothstein. For many people, these places not only represented an incredibly important moment in their lives but have become spaces that are no longer recognizable when they return, even if it’s only been a few years.

“There's a place that you went to that felt really special and kind of singular in a way that that experience will never be recreated, and the things that the people did there will never happen again,” she says. “I wanted to do something that was investigating the city and trying to come to terms with that incredible flux that happens everywhere, but specifically in Vancouver.”

Apollo Ghosts’ Adrian Teacher shared his memories with Rothstein about playing shows at 648 Kingsway when The Toast Collective were running it, and how the entry door would basically open out next to the band while they were playing.

“I remember playing a few times literally onstage and the door opens and somebody’s like, ‘Oh, hey, what’s up?’” he told Rothstein, with a laugh. “It just seemed so easy, it was a really easy spot to just do it yourself, which Vancouver is losing at the moment, right? It only seems like there are a few real places to play these days.”

Over the process of researching all these lost venues, Rothstein has concluded that she can’t imagine the city’s arts scene fully stagnating or being stamped out, but she feels that it also “isn't supported or assisted,” especially when it comes to new and emerging things.

A number of Vancouver-based arts venues have struggled or shut down over the last five years, including venues like the Little Mountain Gallery, a non-profit comedy club which reopened in 2023 after it was renovicted by a development, or Black Lab, a Hastings Street punk space which was shut down in 2024 and The Red Gate Arts Society, which is still going but has been evicted several times before settling into its current location on Main Street. 

These challenges are partly due to financial issues associated with COVID-19 restrictions, but also due to pressures from rental costs and new developments. Two new condo towers are currently being considered for 602-646 Kingsway and 603-617 E 16th Ave, right next to 648 Kingsway, and Anne says that when they first started using the space, they used the laundromat in the complex across from them, but that has all since been torn down for condos.

However, hope remains that art and music will find a way.

“These things have to come and go,” says Kitto. “And all I can hope for is that there will be another one that pops up soon.”

Take Your Time Back aims to find partners to help run another space where they can run music shows again, but they also still put on art shows, yoga classes, workshops and a book club as part of an “ecosystem” of community events that Anne says will still continue on in an arts space they also run next door.