The Haunted Walks kiosk on Sparks Street has been asked to move because it cannot redesign its booth to collapse below sight lines during the day.
The Sparks Street Mall authority should focus on attracting business rather than policing booth sizes, say some of the street's business owners.
The complaints come in light of the authority's decision to place a height restriction on the Haunted Walks Inc. ticket kiosk.
Last November, the Sparks Street Mall Authority notified all ticket kiosks on the street that they were going to be evicted by December.
Glen Shackleton, director and founder of Haunted Walks, which offers historical walking tours, says the authority told him his ticket kiosk could stay if its height could be lowered.
However, he says finding a design that allows for this would be impossible.
“If you have a street with a lot of empty stores and not enough people around, you’re just not going to make a success of it,” says Margaret Lewis, who co-owns O’Shea’s Market Ireland.“To me, worrying about sight lines and the size of the kiosk is bureaucratic and not commercial.”
As long as booths and kiosks look nice and bring in tourists, the mall shouldn’t worry about how tall they are, says Ian Wright, co-owner of The Snow Goose, an Inuit and Native art gallery on the street.
Businesses such as Haunted Walks, which attract tourists and don’t interfere with others on the street, are the kind other Sparks Street business owners like to have around, he says.
“We shouldn’t be trying to drive people like that away,” Wright says.
If the Sparks Street Mall Authority does force the Haunted Walks kiosk to leave the street, Lewis says it might not have a huge impact on the mall because the booth has been located at one end of it and only operates seasonally. But, he adds, its tours have been a positive force for Sparks Street and have brought an element of excitement.
“The more business and the more variety of businesses on this street the more powerful it will be,” Lewis says.
Shackleton says after the mall authority gave him the eviction notice he contacted it and his booth was given a “temporary reprieve from eviction.” He says he was told it could stay if he could find a collapsable design for his booth that allowed it to lower during the day.
According to Shackleton, the mall authority said a new booth would have to be less than four-feet when collapsed, but could be raised up when the booth opened in the evenings. The height restriction is meant to preserve sight lines of businesses across from each other, he says.
However, Shackleton says booth designers and tent trailer manufacturers told him this design was impossible because it could be unsafe and accidently collapse.
Shackleton is currently appealing to the mall authority to exempt his booth from the height restriction. Moving would likely hurt his business and create added costs, he says.
Sam Elsaadi, chairman of the Sparks Street Mall Authority, says the board has never asked Haunted Walks to leave and isn’t trying to kick it out.
In fact, he says the board would like the booth to stay.
He acknowledges the board has asked Shackleton for a booth design with a height restriction.
Elsaadi says the board has given Shackleton a chance to stay because his clientele is different from others. Many tourists who come to Sparks Street go to Shackleton’s booth, he says.
If the authority denies his latest appeal, Shackleton says he will have to find a new location and has been working with the city to do that, but there are no guarantees it can find a solution.