From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
I was spending a typical Friday afternoon yesterday poking around the digital files at Vancouver Archives when I found this photo of the Alhambra Theatre. The photo was taken in 1899, the year the theatre first appears in the city directories and it stood at the corner of West Pender and Howe Street.
While I often run posts lamenting the loss of our old building stock, I do realize that change is inevitable, and all of it isn’t bad. I wanted to know what had replaced this old theatre.
The Alhambra Theatre didn’t last long. By 1901 it was the Royal, and two years later the People’s Theatre. Tom Carter*, who is the expert on anything and everything that’s theatre in Vancouver, tells me that Vaudeville magnates Sullivan and Considine performed a huge renovation and turned it into the Orpheum in 1906. The theatre lasted at 805 West Pender until, according to Tom, its owners rebuilt the Vancouver Opera House into the second Orpheum Theatre in 1913 (the current Orpheum Theatre was built in 1927).
In 1914, the West Pender building is listed in the directories as the “old Orpheum Theatre” and (possibly because it’s now the war years) it doesn’t get a mention again until 1917 when it becomes a tire-dealership. The building then hosts a couple of different taxi companies, and at one point the Sing Lung Laundry.
By 1929 the building has been replaced by the eleven-storey neo-gothic Stock Exchange, its address changes to Howe; and it becomes the home of the Vancouver Stock Exchange until 1947.
It’s a valuable piece of real estate in development hungry Vancouver, and its zoned for a much higher tower. But instead of knocking down this old gem as we’re prone to do, Credit Suisse, a Swiss company has stepped in with the Starchitect behind the restoration of London’s Tate Modern gallery, to incorporate the old building into the design for the new.
The new building will be a 31-storey office tower and the ground floor will be retail.
It’s an impressive looking building, a win for heritage, and a nod to the original architects—Townley and Matheson, the same two who designed Vancouver City Hall in 1936.
*For more on Vancouver’s theatre check out Tom Carter’s chapter in Vancouver Confidential: “Nightclub Czars of Vancouver and the Death of Vaudeville.”
* For more on our missing theatres: Our Missing Theatre Heritage – what were we thinking?
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