An iMax update: It's much worse than I thought
"It's heartbreaking," says a tenant who left the building just weeks ago...
Good morning! If this is your first time here reading about Queen Street’s iMax building, today’s newsletter won’t make much sense. So go read part one now! Ready? Good, because today I have something special - an interview with one of the building’s last tenants. He vacated just a few weeks ago, and he’s got plenty to say. Let’s go…
The reaction was swift. Most of it was outrage. Some of it made me cringe. Many of you made me laugh. Lots of memories were shared. It was a good time. I enjoyed the hell out of it. So thank you for that, it was brilliant.
Last week, I wrote about a sad Saturday night spent walking around a former pillar of Auckland’s entertainment scene that is slowly going to ruin. It’s called various things, including Sky World Indoor Entertainment, or Metro Events Centre, or Force Entertainment, but to most it’s the iMax building, because that’s where Event Cinemas’ otherwise excellent iMax theatre is.
Whatever you call it, it’s a once-thriving, now-decaying complex containing the country’s biggest movie theatre, room for lots of restaurants and eateries, a video game arcade, and plenty of other bits and pieces. In it’s heyday it had Burger King, Borders, Planet Hollywood and Starbucks, but they’re long gone. A few tenants remain, including Event Cinemas, GameOn Arcade, Metrolanes and the Odyssey Maze.
A once bustling hub, it’s become an incredibly strange and eerie place to visit, one that feels borderline abandoned. I called it a “hulking piece of architectural shame” and it caused a bit of a stir. Like me, other people definitely have a problem with this building.
One reader complained about insects taking over the toilets.
Another said she refused to go there because of reported fire safety issues.
Someone compared the whole thing to Wellington - rough!
Another called it a “bizarre hulking ruin” - a term I quite like.
Also, memories!
Your feedback led me down some rabbit holes and I’ve uncovered heaps of information about the state of the building, its tenants, and its future prospects, which I’ll share in a future post.
In amongst all of this, someone slid into my DMs. The message contained an email address for one of the building’s former tenants. “He’s nice - give it a try,” the sender said. So I fired off an email, crossed my fingers, and waited.
I didn’t have to sit for long. Twenty minutes later, I got a reply. “I’m happy to chat on the phone,” said Brad Jacobs, the director of The Coffee Club, a chain of cafes with 65 stores around the country. Brad is in charge of all of them. When I called him a “big wig” on the phone, he laughed and said: “That’s a funny term.”
See? He’s super nice. When I called him, Brad was sitting inside his car outside one of his cafes after paying a visit, checking up on the owners, making sure everything was going okay. It was a good time to chat, he said, and he spent the next half-hour patiently answering my questions.
The Coffee Club spent seven years as one of the iMax building’s permanent residents, opening up onto Aotea Square as a profitable location until Covid-19 lockdowns were enforced last year. Brad told me all about what happened during lockdown, revealed why the building’s eateries closed in droves, and why The Coffee Club was eventually forced to pull out too.
It was thoroughly depressing. In last week’s piece, I expressed hope that the iMax building could be saved, revamped or renovated in some way.
But after talking to Brad, I don’t have much hope left.
It’s all so much worse than I thought.
Here’s my conversation with Brad Jacobs (edited for clarity)…
Hi Brad! I’m keen to talk to you about your experience with one of your Coffee Club franchises, the one in the iMax building on Queen Street that closed recently. When did you give up the lease?
“We hung on as long as we could. We were one of the last (tenants) left standing. Unfortunately, we gave in a few weeks ago. Our final day was a Monday. I’m not sure of the exact date. It was just towards the end of March. A demand notice was expiring. We chose to go before that happened.”
Why did you have to close the store? Was it simply low patronage?
“No. That’s the most frustrating part. Of all of our outlets in the city, it was actually … not trading terribly at all. Of the many tenants in the centre, everyone was down and everyone was hurting, but everyone was holding on to some hope and could see that there would be a future there one day. Without any support from the landlord, it was just impossible.”
So you’re saying the building’s landlord didn’t support his tenants during lockdown?
“Yeah. He just refused any support at all. Unfortunately … there was absolutely no way to force him to help support us. He didn’t have to. It was that simple. He chose not to. He chose to pass on a 10 per cent rent increase. He chose to pass on penalty interest. He chose to pass on his legal costs. We’re up to $18,000-$20,000 of his legal costs - not even our own. Every time we were officially in default of the lease, it entitled him to pass his costs onto us. It was a very tough position he took on everyone.”
Did you see other tenants leaving before you bowed out?
“Yes. As I said, we were one of the last ones left standing. The PappaRich guys (a Malaysian eatery) left in November last year. The whole food court is gone. I walked through the other day and there was one trading, the bakery, which the landlord owns himself anyway. The last time I walked through, the day we closed, not even his bakery was trading … there wasn’t a single person trading.”
The Coffee Club was there for seven years. Was that time not taken in consideration?
“Unfortunately, it meant nothing. We had a number of tenant meetings. We had a little tenant Facebook group where we would share what was happening with each other. The underlying position from everyone was that no one could understand what (the landlord) was trying to achieve. Why would he want to destroy the value of his building? What was the point of it all? He is the landlord, we were the tenants, and he was not going to budge.”
Did customers return after last year’s lockdowns?
“People did start to return. We had a bit of a bounce back in the June-July period. August threw a spanner in the works. Just before Christmas, we started to see some reasonable recovery across all of the cafes. You could really see the city coming back together. It’s been a roller-coaster for sure.”
It can’t be easy closing a cafe down. How did it feel having to pull the plug?
“It’s heartbreaking. I sat there with the franchisees who have owned the business since day one. They looked to me as the franchiser to (have) the answers. I sat there and said, ‘I can’t fix this, and there is nothing in the law that helps us.’ I have written to everyone I can write to. It makes no sense at all. We’re not asking the government to pay our rent for us. We’re asking the government to put some structure in place that makes landlords share some of the pain with us. It seems pretty fair and reasonable to me. Ninety-nine per cent of landlords have done that voluntarily.”
Are the former owners okay? Have they found jobs elsewhere?
“They’re working on another cafe now. They will hopefully open in another location in three or four months. We’ll give them some financial support.”
That’s great news. You negotiated the lease seven years ago. What was attractive about opening The Coffee Club in the iMax building back then?
“To be fair, our location was never about the centre itself. We were always sort of on the outside of the centre. It was more about Aotea Square, the Town Hall, the Civic Theatre, graduations in the square, the pop-up ice rink - there was a lot of activity in that square. It was a really nice hub and we traded extremely well there for a very long time. The city was growing really beautifully. It was never really about the iMax theatre. It was more about what was happening in the area around us.”
At this point, do you think the building can be saved?
“I don’t know what you do with it now. The front of it is heritage listed. It needs a huge amount of work inside. It was very cool 20 years ago. It’s dated and tired now. It’s got some flow problems. If it’s your first time in the building, you’d easily get confused about where you are and how you get back to where you started. I don’t know how they’ll attract new tenants … they’ve had to put locks on the toilet doors. Obviously with no tenants and no people in the building they were getting problems, I would imagine, with homeless people and vandalism. You wonder why they even open the doors and let people walk through.”
Yikes. I told you it was bad. I thought some of those eateries were still open, but the entire food court is empty. There are just two food outlets left operating in the entire complex: Yang Guo Fu, a Chinese eatery, and Oko Dessert Kitchen (which is really yum btw). As well, many toilets are closed, some are padlocked, and one has possibly been taken over by bugs. It makes me so sad that the building’s tenants had to start their own Facebook group to support each other. Sigh.
This seems like a clear sign of a domino effect. When one tenant leaves, so does another, and fewer and fewer customers come through. Eventually, they all go. That low patronage must surely be affecting the building’s few remaining tenants. It’s a tough situation for everyone.
I got an email from another tenant, Kathy Aspden, who runs some of the building’s experience-based activities, including the GameOn arcade.
She had this to say: “These aren’t easy times operating a business, especially in a building that has been hit hard by the economics of the current time. This has also been exacerbated by the building’s landlord and management. But your article reads as if only the cinemas are open and operating. There are other businesses that still remain – our businesses - and we would appreciate for this to be highlighted, because implying otherwise could also have an adverse impact on us and is the last thing we need right now! Tenants like the arcade and the maze are Kiwi-owned-and-operated businesses, and we still need every bit of support New Zealand can offer. Despite the state of the building we think we provide a darn good entertainment product and while the state of the building is out of our control we do the best with the spaces we occupy. We hope with the continued support of New Zealanders that the building, in the near future, will be an even more exciting destination for all.”
I reached out to Event Cinemas to ask them about their commitment to the iMax building, how long was left on their lease, and their relationship with the building’s landlord. They replied, somewhat ominously: “We suggest you contact JNJ directly to discuss their plans for the building, they are the landlords.”
So I did. James Kwak is the sole company director of JNJ Holdings, the owner of the building. I found an email address and sent him a few questions about the things said by Brad and Kathy and everyone else on last week’s post. So far, I’ve had no reply, but I hope to talk to him soon.
In the meantime, enjoy this wee nugget that came in via Twitter the other night. It made me drop everything for 15 minutes of shameless YouTubing...
Yes, it’s true. So now that I’ve seen it, everyone else has to enjoy this behind-the-scenes featurette featuring Disney kids from the made-in-New-Zealand 2003 movie You Wish mocking our accent. You’re welcome…
Chris - I am so glad you are highlighting this. I have lived in the CBD for 12 years, during which time I've seen the slow, agonizing decline of the this gig day by day, square foot by square foot. I remember remarking to my friends when it first opened (late 1999 I think?) that the architecture would date quickly. And lo and behold... it did. Part of its problem is that it seems to have been designed specifically for its original anchor tenants - esp. Borders, the Cinemas, Imax and Planet Hollywood. The consequent layout, while creating a stimulating experience back in the day, makes the repurposing of any space virtually out of the question without significant reconstruction.
And now we are left with this gigantic rotting structure smack bang in the middle of the main civic space in NZ's largest city.
In many ways the complex epitomises the history of urban planning in Auckland: short-term gain for long-term pain. And Skyworld's inexcusable neglect is now mirrored the length of Queen St, starting with the shoebox "retail" spaces in those mindless apartment developments designed for swift returns to offshore developers, seeping down to the equally poorly managed shops around the Civic Theatre, the neglected Strand and Mid-City arcades, the formerly oh-so-classy Atrium on Elliott, all nestled within a cityscape of some of the worst urban architecture in the First World.
The only thing stopping me from wishing SkyWorld would burn to the ground (aside from the remaining businesses therein) is the threat such a conflagration would pose to the majestic Civic Theatre next door - one of the few buildings in the CBD that we would be significantly poorer for losing.
I remember when it first opened, I was about 12 and the place was a complete vapour wave dream. The arcade, cinema, rocket elevator and pizza planet - was incredible for NZ at the time.