Vancouver’s Dayton Boots holds fundraiser to rebuild after devastating fire

East Vancouver's Wohlford & Co. building, formerly and still affectionately known as the Dayton Boots Factory, was destroyed in a blaze almost two months ago. (Courtesy: Rob Sturgess)

When fire broke out at a restaurant on Vancouver’s Hastings Street and began spreading to the Wohlford & Co. building next door, Amy Slosky was standing in the road, watching her life’s work crumble.

“It was truly the most helpless feeling, being so powerless to do anything about it,” she says.

It was in the early hours of April 23 when the blaze began at The Indian Chef restaurant and travelled to the iconic East Vancouver building, formerly and still affectionately known as the Dayton Boots Factory, gutting its second floor and burning its roof to the point of collapse.

As someone who worked both the front of house for the building and ran her own shoe making business on its second floor, Slosky says she lost “pretty heavily” that morning.

“I lost not only my business, but my job as I knew it, and the community of other boot makers that I worked with – which is already so small already in Vancouver,” she says.

“To lose all three things in one day was pretty soul crushing. It took me a good few weeks to finally come to terms with this being my new reality.”

Almost two months on and the main floor – which housed the factory production, a retail showroom filled with local, independent designers, and maker and artist studios – is still ravaged from water-damage.

The second floor of the building, which once housed private offices and more studios, is a “complete write-off,” says owner Hall Risk.

Risk says there was “around seven feet of water” in the basement, an area that was in the process of being turned into a recording studio. It was also home to a new event space, opened just six weeks earlier and designed to host comedians, musicians and artists from the community, and a large storage space for the company’s inventory and historical archives.

The building itself, rich with history after opening as the boot factory in 1946, had become much more than just its boots – although the handmade leathers had gained a notorious level of fame in its years, worn by celebrities and appearing on screen in the likes of The X Files and Jumanji.

“We were shipping to 40 countries,” says Risk.

“The thing about our boots is that they are kind of rock and roll, and all sorts of musicians over seven or eight decades have worn them, and are pretty proud of them.”

Over the course of those seven decades the space had also become an outlet for creatives in East Vancouver and around the city, especially in recent years, when such creative spaces were ceasing to exist.

“We were essentially trying to support the artist maker community in East Van,” says Risk, noting how up to 15 different artists had taken up residence permanently in the building.

“It’s basically my life, and then all of our employees and artist collaborators. There’s literally 25 families that make their livelihood through that building, the fire is devastating.”

In the days following the blaze, Risk says he lost count of the number of people who approached him on the street to express their sorrow over the loss of the factory and explain how important it was to them and the neighbourhood.

“East Van’s a pretty tight community. People are passionate about it, and they want to see our sign lit up again,” he says.

The Vancouver Heritage Foundation and The City of Vancouver is working to get the factory back up and running, but Risk says there are tough times ahead and it is going to be a challenge for the next two to three years to “even survive.”

To help garner the cash needed to rebuild, Risk is hosting a fundraiser at The Rio that will see some of the regulars of Dayton Boots’ basement – like the Snotty Nose Rez Kids – take to the stage.

The poster for the event, planned for June 19, depicts a phoenix rising from the ashes, clutching the Dayton Boot Factory’s recognizable neon sign.

“We keep on going, the fire took us down but it’s not going to keep us down,” says Slosky.

“I feel like that’s the resilience of artists and creative people, especially in East Van. People just have a little bit more grit, it’s going to take a lot more than this to take us out.”