With the help of the Gastown Business Improvement Society and the Vancouver archives you can now learn about each building in Gastown through the Gastown Blog Building History Series. Enjoy and keep posted for more history from the Gastown Blog.

In this week’s addition, we are profiling City Hotel, home to Incendio, an Italian restaurant and the Canvas Lounge.  The upper floors are now used for low income housing.

Check out our previous Building History posts on the Hotel Europe, the Landing, Leckie Building, Hotel Dominion, Holland Block, Packing House, Canadian Fairbanks Building, The Boulder, Springer-Van Bramer, Ferguson Block,  Winters Hotel, Buscombe Building and Malkin Building

City Hotel -  99 Powell Street
Built: 1905-1912
Architecture Style: Combination of Victorian and Edwardian

CVA 359-32 – 1912

The City Hotel, also known as the Anchor Hotel, fronts on Columbia, Powell and Alexander streets and was built in stages from 1905 to 1912. An addition to the West side and a fourth floor was added in 1910. Like many of Gastown’s hotels, the City Hotel catered to loggers, miners and steamship passengers.  Fitted up in first-class style, it had a well stocked bar, a wine room and the most impressive billiards room in the city.

CVA: HOT. P.52, N.50 - 1914. Bar Tender was generally bright, strong, popular and discreet; well dressed and well paid. The service of the day was ‘help yourself’. The bottle was placed on the bar and you and your friend would pour your own drink, the Bar Tender would then add the water or soda. To have measured the drinks the way we do today would have been an affront.

The beveled edge of the building at Powell and Columbia reflects the fact that for many years the Canadian Pacific Railway’s (CPR) track to False Creek ran through the corner of the site.

Bob Swanson, a partner in the hotel, had also been a wrestler in the Klondike and was known for taking on the best the Klondike could throw at him.  He was renowned for having taken on the world’s wrestling champion, Frank Goch. While in the Klondike, Goch was fighting under the name of Frank Kennedy and apparently Swanson gave him a good fight.

VPL 7569 – 1908 – SW Corner of Alexander & Columbia Street.