The for sale sign is down at The Vogue Cinema in Sackville.
The 78-year old theatre has been officially off the market for a few weeks, but not because a deal has been closed with a buyer. A real estate agent who formerly represented owner Jeff Coates confirmed the building is off the market, and said they were not authorized to give more details about the situation.
Coates, who ran the cinema for 17 years and worked there for a decade before that, refused to comment on the current status of the beloved cinema and venue.
The listing and sale of the building could have hit complications from an outstanding debt that was registered against the property in 2022, and a bankruptcy filing last month against Coates’ numbered company (059145 NB Ltd.), which owns the property and operated the cinema.
A search on Service New Brunswick’s Land Registry Services shows a $65,057.56 debt registered against the property at 9 Bridge Street, originally owed to the Canada Revenue Agency by Coates’ numbered company. The debt was registered against the property in December 2022, but dates back to five years before that, in December 2017.
The bankruptcy filing comes from another source, the Community Business Development Corporation (CBDC) Westmorland Albert, which provides financial and technical services to entrepreneurs and small businesses in the region. The filing from the CBDC says Coates’ company owes the organization $76,251.19, and asks that the numbered company which owns the Vogue be deemed bankrupt due to unmet liabilities.
‘More complicated than we had hoped’
The outstanding bankruptcy filing and debt registered against the cinema property have complicated matters for one local group trying to save the Vogue as a cultural space.
Shary Boyle is a celebrated visual artist and Sackville resident. She’s part of the working group brought together last summer by Sackville Film Society director Thaddeus Holownia to investigate the potential for a community takeover of the space.
Boyle says the group spent the fall getting organized, and have viewed the building once. While the potential bankruptcy is creating further uncertainty, Boyle says the group is still interested and hopeful.
“It’s more complicated than what we had hoped,” says Boyle. “It’s a really long process.”
As they wait to find out the fate of the Vogue building, Boyle says the group continues to get organized. “Our first step is to really get into that building and see the state of it, to see what’s possible, to see what kind of fundraising and business plan it would take to really make it run.”
And then the group plans to reach out to involve the wider community. “We wanted to really wait until we had something solid to report before we reached out,” says Boyle, “just to avoid confusion. But we are working behind the scenes. And we can’t wait to get everybody else kind of enthusiastic and onboard.”
“As soon as we have all our ducks in a row, then our first order [will be] to reach out to all the community stakeholders,” says Boyle.
