Skwachays Lodge, Cultural Tourism and Vancouver’s “Gentrifying DTES”

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

I’m not a huge fan of facadism—the practice of keeping the front of the building and tearing everything else down behind it—but in the case of Skwachays Lodge, it made sense.

In 1913, W.T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower, created a three-storey brick residential building at 31 West Pender Street that was known as the Palmer Rooms. Over the years, it was called the Pender Hotel and the Wingate Hotel. Oddly the building was formally recognized as one of Canada’s Historic Places in 1994.

I say oddly, because the place was a dump. The hotel was used as a repository for stolen property; there were rumours of a meth lab, of a connection to the Pickton farm, and involvement with a well known criminal organization. The hotel witnessed a lot of depravity and violence over the years, and apparently there wasn’t much left of it worth saving.

I dropped by the hotel last week. It’s now owned and operated by the Vancouver Native Housing Society, and I’m impressed with what they’ve done.

Judy Graves tells me that she was at the official soil turning ceremony where two very dedicated elders spent a couple of hours smudging the basement foundation with sage. It worked, because Skwachays (pronounced Squatch Eyes) has a welcoming feel to it.

The building provides 24 housing units for artists and 18 hotel rooms, each one designed by aboriginal artists to reflect a different theme with names such as the Hummingbird, the Moon and the Northern Lights suite.

Included in the building is a traditional longhouse on the roof topped off by the Dreamweaver—a 40-foot totem pole, as well as a sweat lodge, smudge room and artists’ workshop. On the first floor, where you check in, there’s an aboriginal-run art gallery.

I found out about Skwachays when it appeared on the Guardian’s top 10 hotels in Vancouver list that “celebrate art, history and the best in food and drink.” The article promotes the Skwachays—which ranked second—to UK travelers as “Vancouver’s newest boutique hotel in the city’s gentrifying downtown east side.”

With thanks to Maggie Edwards, general manager for letting me poke around and supplying the photos taken by Craig Minielly at Aura Photographics.

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