Description of Historic Place

The Town and Robinson Block is a two storey Victorian Italianate style masonry building, located on the east side of Carrall Street in the historic district of Gastown.

Heritage Value

Gastown is the historic core of Vancouver, and is the city's earliest, most historic area of commercial buildings and warehouses. The Gastown historic district retains a consistent and distinctive built form that is a manifestation of successive economic waves that followed the devastation of the Great Fire in 1886, the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1887, the Klondike Gold Rush and the western Canadian boom that occurred prior to the First World War. Built in 1889, the Town and Robinson Block is valued as an early Gastown hotel and mixed commercial building, representative of the area's seasonal population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Vancouver emerged as western Canada's predominant commercial centre. Hotels such as this provided both short and long-term lodging, serving primarily those who worked in the seasonal resource trades such as fishing and logging. Many of these hotels had combined functions of commercial services on the ground floor and lodging rooms on the upper floors, which contributed to the lively street life in Gastown.

The Town and Robinson Block is also valued as an early example of the influence of the Victorian Italianate style, illustrating how popular architectural styles were used by the hotel business to market a progressive image. It was designed by one of Vancouver's earliest architects, Charles Osborn Wickenden (1851-1934). Wickenden's designs for commercial buildings helped establish the character of early Winnipeg and Vancouver business districts as prosperous and progressive areas. The contractor for this project was the firm of McGhie and McLuckie; J.M. McLuckie was a pioneer Vancouver contractor who later became well-known for his commercial and residential structures in Gastown.

Source: City of Vancouver, Heritage Planning Street Files

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of the Town and Robinson Block include:
- spatial relationship to other late Victorian and Edwardian era commercial buildings
- location adjacent to Maple Tree Square, in close proximity to the waterfront of Burrard Inlet and the Canadian Pacific Railway yard
- siting on the property lines, with no setbacks
- two-storey form, scale and symmetrical massing with rectangular plan and flat roof; with one storey extension at rear
- masonry construction: brick facade with continuous rough-dressed sandstone sill course; and common red brick side and rear walls
- Victorian Italianate influence as expressed in elements such as its segmented arch windows, stepped parapets and corbelled brick detail
- seven double-hung 1-over-1 wood-sash windows on the front facade upper storey
- sheet metal cornice between ground and upper storeys