FeedsTeens protest Quo Vadis demolition
As city officials work with developers on the proposed $5 million fitness center on the site of the defunct Quo Vadis Theater, two area teens are leading a grassroots campaign to preserve the site.
According to 16-year-old Don Gurka of Livonia, the theater caught his interest and that of his friend, Zac Gizicki, a 15-year-old Westland resident, as they walked past it last year. Curious, the duo began to research the site and found that it had a rich history in the community. One of his favorite revelations was that the site had been designed by Minoru Yamasaki—who, Gurka said, went on to utilize a similar floor plan in his design for the World Trade Center in New York.
“People don’t expect 15 and 16 year olds to care about things like this,” he said. “This is important. History shouldn’t be as disposable as last week’s garbage.”
Matters snowballed from there as the teens decided in late 2007 to launch an effort to save the site, including creating a web site, www.savetheqv.org, and launching a petition drive. The site had been deserted since 2002 with little talk of redevelopment, so the teens figured they would have time to campaign. The recent announcement that the city was working with a developer who hoped to tear down the theater came as a shock, he said.
“I didn’t expect anything quite this big when we took this on,” Gurka admitted. “It was kind of like a brick in the face—I didn’t expect it to happen so soon.”
Although the teens weren’t able to reach their goal of 1,000 signatures before the planning commission meeting Tuesday, he said that they are still focused on working with the city and with the developer to save as much history as possible.
“Our goal is to stop the demolition at all costs,” he said.
Their goal, he said, would be to see the theater restored and up-and-running.
“It was obviously well suited for films,” he said. “Live theater is definitely an option, too.”
However, he acknowledged that such a departure from the current proposal would be a very hard sell.
“I can’t see them abandoning it completely,” he said. “They’ve obviously sunk a lot of money into it. I hope if they do decide to develop it, they at least keep part of it.”
Gurka said that he and Gizicki intend to continue to work with the various entities involved to try and convince them to save the theater, incorporate at least a small part of it into the proposed fitness center, or at minimum, to allow the teens inside the site to take final photographs of the premises before the wrecking ball falls to add to their web site.
