Description of Historic Place

The historic place at 54 East Cordova Street is a four-storey, plus basement, purpose-built, buff brick, stone, and iron hotel and store, located in Vancouver's historic Gastown.

Heritage Value

The former hotel, at 54 East Cordova Street is of value as an essay in Edwardian building construction, as a good example of a hotel whose design responded to the City's strict new lodging house building code, for its association with Vancouver's pre-World War I building boom, and for its continuing use as rooms for low income single persons.

The former Alvin Rooms, a hotel built in 1912 to designs of architect Hugh Braunton as a speculative development for W.G. Harvey, is an excellent example of cutting-edge Edwardian building technology and design. The building, much of whose original arrangements survive, is of value for illustrating the reforms of the City of Vancouver's 1910 Lodging House By-Law, combined with the realities of speculative real estate investment. These by-laws were not unique, but rather formed the local response to a pattern of urban reform that swept across western Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. In the context of housing, these reforms emphasize the provision of fresh air, natural light, bathrooms, and fire escapes. Valuable features of the design that survive include the means of escape from fire, and provision of fresh air and natural light in every bedroom from a long deep light well, equipment of every room with a radiator, a wash-basin, and cupboard, and each floor with a bathroom and toilets. Braunton also apprehended the difficulty of maintaining the windows in the light well, and used metal frames.

The significance of this building is amplified by neighbouring properties 42 and 50 East Cordova Street, both hotels designed in the same year by Hugh Braunton, and possessing very similar architectural treatment.

The hotel was built at a time when there was pressure for both short- and long-term accommodation in Vancouver - a product of the booming economy that attracted people and investment to the City and civic initiatives - which had closed sub-standard lodging houses and hotels. The building at 54 East Cordova Street is a product of all these factors.

Source: City of Vancouver Heritage Conservation Program

Character-Defining Elements

The character defining elements of 54 East Cordova Street include:
- Location in Vancouver's historic Gastown district
- Occupation of entire lot
- Similarity to neighbouring buildings
- Design features, including long corridors terminating in escape doors on every storey, arrangements of rooms, bathrooms and toilets, and the light well
- Materials of construction, including the white enamelled bricks on the front elevation, the stone pilaster bases, projecting strings and caps, the stone window sills, the metal cornice, and the metal components of the window frames
- The articulation of the East Cordova Street elevation, including the division of the facade into two bays by prominent pilasters, and the treatment of the ground floor as a building-wide shop front with side door to the upper floors
- The elaborate metal cornice, its anthemion corbels and the remains of the urn-shaped termini atop the cornice over each pilaster
- The fenestration, including the surviving finished woodwork, glazing and paint remnants of the storefront and the shallow bay windows of the upper floors, including their sash assemblies and panelled transoms