Description of Historic Place

The historic place at 55 Powell Street is a four-storey brick commercial building with frontages to both Powell Street to the south and Alexander Street to the north, within Vancouver's historic Gastown.

Heritage Value

Constructed between 1906 and 1910, this plain four-storey building was used for residential accommodation above and commercial shops on the ground floor. It is of value for demonstrating a pattern of use that was common in this part of Gastown, where both retail and residential were geared to serving the itinerant population of male resource workers who came and went from the city at regular intervals. Especially in the winter, when the logging camps were shut down, men lounged on the street and passed their time in the bars. The barbershop located in this building in 1910 likely catered to men recently returned from the bush. Later, the businesses on the ground floor were, like many others along Powell, operated by Japanese families.

Upstairs, the Grand Trunk Rooms provided lodging in small rooms at rates affordable to working men. At one point, in the 1940s, one of the shop spaces was divided into eight tiny cubicles which housed older Chinese men displaced by a fire in Shanghai Alley.

The roughly 25 rooms upstairs continued to serve low income Vancouverites until it was converted into a youth hostel in the early twenty-first century. The representative character of these uses, and the change of use, forms an important part of the building's heritage value.

Further heritage value is found in the way the owners maximized the commercial frontage with retail space on both the Alexander and Powell Street elevations. This reflects the intensity of development in Gastown and speaks to the area's role as Vancouver's first urban neighbourhood.

Source: City of Vancouver Heritage Conservation Program

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of 55 Powell Street include:
- mid-block location
- occupation of entire lot with shops opening on both Alexander and Powell Streets
- uses, including retail on the ground level and accommodation above
- chunky lintels above and below one-over-one vertical sliding sash windows
- arrangement of windows in two paired courses, plus a single line down the centre
- roof concealed behind parapet
- rough red brick on upper three storeys
- rusticated stone pillars framing the ground floor entries
- anonymous and simple entry to the rooms above from the ground floor
- external fire escape, signalling the residential uses above