Headlines from the past is a recurring feature looking back at stories we've covered over the past 40+ years.
For better or worse, the Wild Duck Inn was a local landmark.
Tucked next to the Lougheed Highway where it meets the Mary Hill Bypass in Port Coquitlam, the Tudor-style tavern was notorious for its exotic dancers and sometimes less-than-reputable customers. It was used to film a brutal rape scene in the 1988 Jodie Foster film, The Accused.
Other Hollywood stars who alighted its interior for various productions included Gwyneth Paltrow, Melissa Gilbert and Sean Penn, who scouted it as a potential set for a project he was working on with Jack Nicholson.
But in 2000, owner Joe Kogler, who’d acquired the pub in 1988, decided the old watering hole was due for a makeover.
Using the money he’d made renting the facility to film crews, Kogler set out to reimagine The Duck as an Irish pub and restaurant to be called Dublin Docks.
“We want to change the image of the pub,” Kogler told the Tri-City News, adding the makeover would honour his wife’s Irish heritage.
Instead of a brass pole atop a stage, Kogler said he planned theme nights and live music, as well as an upgraded menu.
“We’re going to get rid of the dancers,” he said. “We are missing 50 per cent of our population right now.”
By December, the last stripper had twirled around The Duck’s brass pole and many of its fixtures, like the giant map of Pitt Lake that had occupied a place of honour behind the bar for 20 years, were auctioned off.
In 2008 the pub was demolished to accommodate construction of the new Pitt River Bridge.
The Tri-City News has covered civic affairs, local crime, festivals, events, personalities, sports and arts in Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody since 1983. Bound back issues of the paper are available at the Coquitlam Archives, while digital versions of several past years can be found at issuu.com.
