A pop-up business village will give Jasper businesses displaced by last summer’s wildfire a place to temporarily set up shop this upcoming tourist season.
Multiple businesses have expressed interest in the village, including Vicious Cycle, a bike, ski and snowboard shop that lost its Jasper location in the fire.
“With the loss of our business, we feel it’s important for us to get a footprint back in the town as soon as we can,” said owner Paul Burgess. “We do have a small space that we are going to be occupying in the next few weeks, but definitely for the rental part of our business, we’re going to need the pop-up space, and we’re looking forward to trying to help get back to normal.”
The pop-up business village will be in the Connaught Drive public parking lot adjacent to Hazel Avenue, taking up the first row of 21 parking stalls north of the washrooms. According to the municipality, this will give displaced businesses a centralized and visible location to operate.
Municipal council approved the initiative during its Tuesday (Feb. 5) meeting.
Businesses are expected to pay $1,850 per stall for the season. Only those displaced by the 2024 wildfire can participate in this initiative.
“We have a couple of sea cans under construction right now to accommodate a retail operation and storage for rentals and hopefully be able to conduct business as normally as possible,” Burgess said.
The village will also be situated just across the street from Vicious Cycle’s original location prior to the fire.
“We’re ecstatic to be close to where we originally were,” Burgess said. “We’ve got the bathrooms right there, so I think that that makes sense as far as the location goes, and we’ll be able to operate fairly close to normal out of the sea cans, so we’re very happy with it.”
While the municipality has yet to publicly announce a start date, Burgess said they were hoping to open their pop-up location by May. He added they would continue to seek a permanent location.
Trevor Lescard, general manager of Maligne Rafting Adventures, said it took them 10 years to afford a downtown location.
“Unfortunately, during the fire, the upper level of the building caught fire, and our office was heavily damaged by water and mould damage,” Lescard said. “It’s not going to be fixed by this summer and potentially next summer.”
He noted they also lost their rafting compound, including six vehicles and 22 rafts, at Jasper’s industrial park. They expect to have their equipment replaced by the spring.
Amid this uncertainty, Maligne Rafting Adventures was one of many businesses that approached the municipality about potentially allowing a temporary pop-up location.
Lescard said the Connaught Drive parking lot was a good location to temporarily host their business for the tourist season, highlighting the availability of parking and the public washrooms as well as the street frontage that will make their pop-up store visible to passersby.
“Without the opportunity of having a sales office, we would likely be 40 per cent more down than we were already going to be down, so having a retail space is vital to our business,” he said.
Although they explored the possibility of sharing a retail space with another business, Lescard explained how the two businesses don’t necessarily have an overlapping demographic, and it was ultimately better for them to have their own space.
He thanked local officials for being open to ideas and thinking outside the box when it came to Jasper’s recovery.
“We are all trying to rebound from the fire,” Lescard said. “Many of us in business have been affected to different levels, but we will all be affected this summer just due to less accommodation so therefore less people even able to enjoy Jasper this summer, so [we'll do] whatever we can do to get through the next couple of years.”
