While a string of rough years is driving Steve’s Music Store away from Rideau Street after 42 years, manager Dan Sauvé said he’s optimistic that brighter days are ahead for the area.
A fixture at 308 Rideau St. near King Edward Avenue, the music store will move to a new location early in 2025 after several years struggling with ongoing construction and other challenges right outside its door.
The new location will be announced in the next few weeks, Sauvé said.
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“It’s a bit of a moving target,” he told OBJ Friday. “We’re just getting our ducks in a row. But in a perfect world, probably at some point in February we’re at the new place.”
Like many businesses along Rideau Street, the music store has faced a number of back-to-back challenges that finally made its current location untenable, he said.
While recent times have been particularly difficult, Sauvé said it’s the culmination of multiple factors over a period of years that is ultimately driving the business away.
“To take into context the last decade and a half, what’s been happening on Rideau. There was the major infrastructure project where basically all of Rideau got torn down. You’ve got the construction, then you’ve got the LRT, which blocked the street for another four years. Followed by COVID, followed by the trucker convoy, followed by the opioid crisis,” he said.
“If you look at it as one series of events after another, it’s really hard to justify keeping a business on Rideau Street anymore.”
Sauvé said the area has changed significantly since he was in college, when he bought his first guitar amp at Steve’s at age 19. He later took a job at a Steve’s location in Montreal, before moving back to Ottawa to work at the Rideau Street location in 2014.
Now, safety has become a major concern.
“Rideau Street was always a major commerce hub at that point,” he said. “We’re talking tons of record stores, lots of independent retail, not just the Rideau Centre. There were homeless people, as you’d expect in any city, but I don’t remember ever feeling ill at ease or unsafe, even up until COVID. We knew the regulars. They’re just people in a tough spot.”
But the pandemic brought hard times, drawing more people to the ByWard Market area, often those struggling with addiction and the effects of a toxic drug supply. Sauvé said it’s brought a criminal element that wasn’t as prevalent before.
He said people sometimes deal in front of his door and there were a few instances where someone overdosed nearby. Other times, people would come in and case the store for expensive items, like guitars worth thousands of dollars. While there weren’t any thefts, there were a few broken windows, he said.
“That was kind of the last straw,” he said. “ We were a little left to our own devices. It was pretty blatant, to the point where, for the last year, we’ve had to keep the front door locked and buzz our clients in. And even that didn’t prevent people from trying to grab stuff.”
Rideau Street not a lost cause
While Steve’s is moving on from the area, Sauvé said Rideau Street could be made into an attractive destination once again.
Safety concerns are one of the main reasons he thinks customers are currently staying away.
“Nobody really wants to come to Rideau Street,” he said. “It’s not even that they don’t want to come to Rideau Street. I think most citizens of Ottawa avoid it because people will go to the most convenient place for what they need. If they’re going to go out of their way, they want to have a pleasant experience. Walking around a bunch of needles is not exactly what somebody would consider a good experience.”
Because these types of issues have no easy answers, Sauvé said he expects that Rideau Street and ByWard Market businesses will continue to contend with them for at least a few more years.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll last forever.
“There’s some really good people on the ground trying really hard,” he said. “I think (Rideau-Vanier Coun. Stéphanie Plante) is excellent and she’s been an excellent advocate for the neighbourhood. I think in the next five to 10 years, I’m pretty confident it’s going to change. There’s a lot of things going the right way, we just couldn’t afford to stick around and wait. If everything goes to plan, I think the Market is going to find its growth back in a different way.”
Ottawa’s music industry, meanwhile, is also in a transformative period that’s bringing with it unique opportunities, he said.
With the new store, which will be centrally located, Sauvé said he plans to bring back events, workshops and how-tos – the kinds of things the store had worked on before the pandemic. He said he’d also like to introduce some kind of incubator program for local DJs, who are on the rise but currently underserved in the community.
“I think the Ottawa scene is in a really interesting place,” said Sauvé, who is also on the board of directors for the Ottawa Music Industry Coalition. “There’s a lot of fun things happening and a lot of opportunities starting to bubble up. I’m genuinely excited for what this chapter for us is going to be.”
