‘I made that place home’
Tattoo shop owners in distress after arson guts James North studio
Flames crept up the stairs of a downtown building last week and swirled into the tattoo studio where Thomas Penny once worked below a collection of rare and exotic art, each with its own tender memory left floating in plumes of thick smoke.
No insurance could replace how Penny, 35, passed customers’ time as they sat in the studio and listened to the stories behind his mementoes, like the hand-painted mask he found on a small Japanese island some five years ago.
Back then, when Penny and friend Rob Veinotte were new owners of the James Street North tattoo shop Grey Harbour, clients asked him about it all the time: What is that? And where did you get it?
Penny would tell them how he found it, the trip he took to get there, why he likes it.
“When people get tattooed, they spend hours with us and they like to look at the walls and they like to see things and ask questions as distractions,” he said.
Penny made a point to himself after that trip to Japan: his workstation — which sits directly atop La Bichette, a luxury boutique — would become a stopgap for anything cultural and art-related, anything that had a story to tell.
There would be the mask from New Zealand and the mask from Indonesia, both hand-painted and eclectic in design. There would be the giraffe figurine from South Africa. And there would be, of course, the artwork, a handful of pieces painted by Penny, including two portraits of his dogs, Dussy and Liddy. Those were his favourite.
They all rushed to mind when Penny got a text from Veinotte around 7:30 p.m. April 21 that showed Born and Raised, an eatery down the block from their shop, on fire.
“We had a small conversation where I said, ‘I should go by our shop just to get some of my important things, just in case something were to happen,’” Penny said.
But it was already happening. The Hamilton Fire Department was simultaneously dousing two fires on James Street North by the time Penny hopped in his car and made way for his studio.
Crews first responded to a “well-involved” blaze in the staircase of 161 James St. N., where Grey Harbour sits on the second and third floors, and minutes later to 224 James St. N., where a small fire on the patio of Born and Raised had since been doused by its owner.
“I got a call from Rob right after that text telling me our building was also on fire. Instantly,
I felt sick to my stomach,” Penny said. “I drove over and I could see the flashing lights from Wentworth and Cannon. I already knew it was true.
“My fear of trying to get something … It was too late.”
A 32-year-old man is facing arson charges for the fires, which police say were deliberate and related. No one was injured.
Sanjai Kumar, the owner of the Victorian-style building where La Bichette and Grey Harbour operate, pegs the initial damage to be at least $100,000, but it’s likely to increase after insurers conduct further investigation.
Kumar said La Bichette sustained manageable smoke damage and losses to its inventory. Grey Harbour got the brunt of it as the smoke rose and “lost everything.”
Penny said his studio had minimum content insurance of about $25,000. When the insurance adjuster visited the building, he said they “didn’t even make it past my second floor — Rob works on the third — before they said it was a total writeoff and that we’ve hit our max coverage.”
“We’ve been told so far by our insurance that we have to let go of the sentimental value, that you can’t put a price on that,” Penny said. “I’ve just been devastated. Leaving the building in the state it’s in, coming home, I feel lost.”
Despite the walls being peeled, windows shattered and tattoo beds unusable, some items were salvageable. Veinotte picked up a replica bison head he hung on the wall to get it repaired. Penny picked up a few paintings, including the portraits of his two dogs, now shaded in charcoal on the edges.
“I made that place home,” he said. “I have (paintings) that I’ll reframe as a memento of what was, and I’ll still hang them in my station when we get a new one, eventually.”
A GoFundMe has been set up by a mutual friend of the coowners to help mitigate any extra costs to inventory.
“My fear of trying to get something … It was too late.”
THOMAS PENNY
CO-OWNER OF GREY HARBOUR