Lighting up the downtown eastside

Restored hotel, stunning deco sign a beacon of hope for a troubled area

By John Mackie, January 8, 2009

You wouldn't think a sign would have that big an impact on a street. But a new three-storey neon sign for the Pennsylvania Hotel has completely transformed the corner of Carrall and Hastings.

What had been one of the most dingy, decrepit corners in the Downtown Eastside is suddenly vibrant and beautiful, a potent symbol for the long-awaited rejuvenation of the troubled neighbourhood. The neon sign is the crowning touch on one of Vancouver's most extensive heritage restorations.

"The neon is almost like the jewelry on the building," said Don Luxton, the heritage consultant on the Pennsylvania restoration.

"It's the finishing touch, the thing you have to have to make it complete."

The sign is a replica of the Pennsylvania's original 1920s neon. It has cool, clean, elegant art deco lines, with white neon letters and amber and reddish-orange neon borders. Built by Knight Signs, it's probably the first neon sign to be erected in the old downtown since neon went out of fashion in the 1960s.

The $47,000 sign is part of an $11-million restoration of the Pennsylvania, which opened in 1906 as the Woods and also operated as the Rainbow and Portland. The official reopening was Wednesday.

The five-storey building was purchased by the non-profit Portland Hotel Society in 2001 for $2,178,000, but has sat empty for the past eight years while the PHS lined up funding sources for the restoration. That money came from all three levels of government, along with $3.6 million in heritage bonus density transfers the PHS sold to Concord-Pacific.

When it closed, the hotel had 70 tiny single-room occupancy units. The upper floors have been remodelled and expanded into 44 bright, airy bachelor suites with their own kitchenettes and washrooms.

"The residents are people from the Downtown Eastside who were at risk of homelessness, or homeless," said Tom Laviolette of the PHS.

"Some folks came from older SROs, and some came from the street."

Among them is Ron McFarlane, who said the new units are "great."

"It's nice moving in here, it's clean, and hopefully it's quiet," said McFarlane, 44.

"You're influenced by your environment -- you're influenced by the company you keep and your environment. I find living down here sucks in general, it just pulls on you. There's not very many, if any, people you can develop a trusting rapport with at all, it just doesn't exist. This is a step in the right direction for me, now I'm going to try and get some work happening."

The neon sign is the last piece in a detailed restoration that included the rebuilding of a turret for the roof, the first turret to be erected on a Vancouver commercial building in a century.

The exterior of the building is almost completely clad in metal sheeting, which had badly deteriorated and has largely been replaced. Some missing cornices and dentil work also went back up, and the old "areaways" under the sidewalk have been resurrected.

Areaways are small spaces underneath those small squares of purple glass you see dotting the sidewalks in the old downtown. They were basically a way for merchants to expand their businesses underground. In this case, the PHS imported new, reinforced glass from Florida to go with a new, structurally reinforced sidewalk.

"Those light wells were shipped from Florida," Laviolette said. "A truck can drive over them and they can withstand the weight."

The areaways are one of the key features in a two-storey, 2,200- square-foot space at the back of the hotel that the PHS hopes to rent out as a 130-seat restaurant. The restaurant space also contains the Woods Hotel's elaborate metal "bird cage" elevator, which doesn't work any more but is drop-dead gorgeous.

The building was designed in a popular San Francisco style of the time that featured rows of bay windows up and down the length of the building.

"The bay windows make it light," said artist Hank Bull, who runs an art gallery across the street.

"This was the equivalent of the glass tower [of today]. This was the first glass tower in Vancouver."

Bull has been working in and around the Downtown Eastside for decades. He hopes the Pennsylvania restoration, and its neon sign, will spark a resurrection of what was once a very happening area.

"I watched them put the sign up in the middle of a blizzard around Christmas time, and they did a great job," he said.

"They worked right into the night and had the lights on by 7 p.m. in the dark. Look at the way it goes with the Only Seafoods [neon sign]. Let's bring the neon back to Hastings Street! This was the street of light, and now it's coming back."

jmackie@vancouversun.com

City of Vancouver Heritage Conservation

Statement of Significance

Description of Historic Place
The Pennsylvania Hotel is a five-storey plus basement, masonry commercial structure with a distinctive polygonal corner bay and tiers of metal-clad cantilevered bay windows above the ground floor. It is located at the intersection of West Hastings and Carrall Streets in the historic district of Gastown in Vancouver.

Heritage Value
The Pennsylvania Hotel is historically important for its contribution to the development of the Hastings Street corridor as Vancouver's primary commercial thoroughfare during the early twentieth century. Gastown had developed as the earliest centre of Vancouver's commercial activities, and the subsequent construction of commercial buildings and hotels along Hastings Street during the western Canadian boom lasted until the First World War. This led to a southward shift of the commercial district, and the Pennsylvania Hotel - built in 1906 as the Woods Hotel for J.S. and Eliza Woods - was one of the first major hotels to be built on Hastings Street. One of the city's better establishments, this hotel accommodated wealthy travellers and commercial businessmen, rather than the seasonal workers who lived in less elaborate hotels and lodgings in the area. It served a combined function, providing commercial space on the ground floor and lodging rooms on the upper floors, contributing to the lively street life in downtown Vancouver. Over time, as the business district shifted further west, the east side of downtown went into economic decline, and for many years the Pennsylvania Hotel provided low cost housing for the area's residents.

The location of the Pennsylvania Hotel represents the nexus of the transportation network that served Edwardian-era Vancouver and the surrounding region. Situated near commuter rail and streetcar lines, and within walking distance of the harbour, the ferry to North Vancouver, and the Union Steamship Docks at the south foot of Carrall Street, this hotel's strategic location was further enhanced when the terminus of the British Columbia Electric Railway was built across the street, connecting downtown with the people and goods of the Fraser Valley.

The Pennsylvania Hotel is also significant for its sophisticated architecture, strongly influenced by contemporary styles in the United States. The highly-articulated facade, composed in a rippling sequence of four-storey bay windows and originally capped by a prominent corner turret, was specifically reminiscent of the design of many buildings in San Francisco prior to the 1906 earthquake. Other original features reflected the influence of the Romanesque Revival style, demonstrating the transitional nature of architecture during the mid-Edwardian era, before the pervasive influence of classicism. Typical of downtown Vancouver, the Pennsylvania Hotel had functional basement areaways that extended under the street, with sidewalk prisms to bring light into the underground space.

The Pennsylvania Hotel is additionally significant as a surviving mid-career design by prolific architect, William T. Whiteway (1856-1940). Whiteway arrived in Vancouver at the time of the Great Fire and worked in Vancouver from 1886-1887, then followed other building booms in the United States and Canada before returning to Vancouver where he became one of the leading local architects. His designs in the area include the original part of the Woodward's Department Store at Hastings and Abbott Streets (1903), the Kelly, Douglas warehouse on Water Street (begun 1905) and the World (Sun) Tower at Beatty and Pender Streets, once the tallest commercial building in the British Empire (1911-12).

Character-Defining Elements
Key elements that define the heritage character of the Pennsylvania Hotel include its:
- corner location, built to the property lines with no setbacks, within the Gastown historic district
- commercial form, scale and massing as expressed by its five-storey height (with basement), narrow rectangular plan, flat roof, and tiered bay windows
- masonry construction with heavy timber-frame internal structure; tan, high-fire, iron-spot facing brick, with narrow, red mortar joints; sandstone window sills; and common red brick on side and rear elevations
- exterior features such as: sheet metal cornice; sheet metal cladding of bay windows; continuous sills; sign-plate atop the principal Carrall Street bay; and remnants of the continuous secondary cornices
- asymmetrical fenestration; double-hung 1-over-1 wooden sash windows; small, rectangular wooden sash windows on the Hastings Street façade with sandstone sills; paired, segmental arch openings with double-hung 1-over-1 wooden sash windows on the east elevation; and single and paired fire escape doorways with sandstone thresholds on the Carrall Street facade
- interior architectural details, such as: wooden mouldings and trim; coffered ceiling with wooden beams in the ground floor commercial space; mosaic tile floors; cast iron radiators; open cage elevator with elaborate metalwork; elevator electrical machinery and original basement areaway