When I popped my stripper cherry, I never thought it would be alongside members of Vancouver's Heritage Society. But that's exactly who I found myself with last night at Heritage Vancouver's evening at The Penthouse Nightclub on Seymour and Nelson, one of Canada's oldest still operating strip clubs.

The history of The Penthouse is amazing, with scores of celebrities hanging out since it opened in 1947 (Frank Sinatra, Billy Holiday, Sammy Davis Jr). The tour started outside where Joe Filippone's nephew, Danny, joked to a mixed crowd (some carrying their martini's outside with them, sipping away), and ended with a talk by UBC professor Becki Ross as she detailed the history of the sex trade in the West End.

The thing that really struck me as I gazed up at the old building and toured the inside, was a single thought: wait a tic, Vancouver DOES have history. You wouldn't really know it from walking around our town with its sexless glass structures held together by concrete and steel beams. A few of those buildings are interesting; an entire city full of them is architecturally antiseptic.

A friend recently visited from San Francisco and remarked as I took him around Gastown: "Ah, so this is Vancouver." Apparently, he had been waiting to see buildings made of brick and wood, or at least buildings that were older than the Internet.

The Granville Street Redesign is a perfect example of our city demolishing older buildings to replace them with Robson Street strip mall glass look-a-likes. Am I the only one that doesn't want to live in a damn aquarium? Did no one else shed a tear for the death of Capitol 6 theatres? Did we really need another Aldo outlet?

Vancouver has done itself a disservice by clear-cutting areas of the city and sprouting towers that just reflect themselves back to each other. The only thing this is good for are companies that make Windex and tinted glass. Our city is always praised for its architecture, but lately it has left me feeling cold. As I walked around the inside of The Penthouse, I felt a sense of nostalgia for a city I'd never even known. Here was the sense of living past, of vibrancy. Anyone who remembers Fred Herzog's photographs at the VAG knows what I'm talking about.

Alas, I never did get to pop my stripper cherry, as we were told they had double-booked the venue. A disappointment, for sure. We emptied outside and were faced with a towering new development going up right across the street. OMNI, it said in big letters. Its skeletal concrete climbed high. Somehow, I just couldn't imagine Frank Sinatra hanging out up there.

photo by the amazing Byron Barrett in the BR Flickr Pool