Idar Bergseth woke up to the sound of a rock smashing against his Fort Street jewelry store window at 4 a.m last Sunday.
The 78-year-old Bergseth — who had previously stopped a burglary-in-progress with a meat tenderizer many years before — was asleep in his cottage next to Idar Jeweller.
He jumped out of bed, dialled 911, and went down into the street to defend his store.
But the man who took a rock to his storefront disappeared before Bergseth could confront him, leaving the jeweller with shattered glass, ringing alarms, and a $10,000 repair bill.
Lance Glenn, a design consultant at the store, said that the most important thing was that no one was hurt it. “Nothing got stolen, everybody’s alright.”
Allied Glass was on site clearing out the broken glass and boarding up the broken window with plywood within an hour, he said, but a replacement window, designed for jewelry stores, will take a while to arrive.
Bergseth doesn’t know whether police apprehended the man who broke his window. But he knows that his business is not the first one that has suffered a broken window in the past month on Fort Street.
“The lawyers had their windows broken a few weeks ago, Lunds [auctioneers] got its windows smashed in,” Bergseth said.
Glenn said that the community has pulled together around the Idar store since word spread about the incident.
People have been stopping by the store, a longstanding fixture on Fort Street, with muffins and other baked goods.
Concerned that the boarded-up shopfront would signal a closed store, Bergseth commissioned a new sign from Metropol Industries, a local print shop to help indicate that it was still open. “They pulled out all their stops, they had everything ready in a day,” Glenn said.
To help offset the visual impact, the store asked artist Shawn Shepherd to paint a mural on the plywood covering the window opening, which will remain there for the three or four weeks until a window replacement arrives from Vancouver.
The mural’s colourful pastels and stylized bee logo is surrounded by a jagged black border symbolizing the broken glass, Shepherd said.
Insurance will cover some of the costs of the broken window and the store is looking to recoup more of its losses through the $65,000 city-funded grant that pays up to $1,000 or 50 per cent of a business’s repair costs arising from vandalism.
Councillor Matt Dell, who has been supportive of the initiative, acknowledges that the fund isn’t enough to cover every instance of vandalism.
It’s a tough decision to choose between fully funding a few repairs or spreading that money around as a “good-faith funding” gesture, he said.
But he’s optimistic that there will be more funds next year now that the city’s paid parking program has been expanded and has increased city revenue.
“Maybe there could be some more opportunities with that money, which is meant for downtown revitalization, to look at expanding the program and to offer more help,” he said.
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