Vancouver’s signature “flatiron” building is the Europe Hotel at 43 Powell St. Built in 1908-09, eight years after Queen Victoria’s reign ended, it is still characteristically Victorian in both its appearance and location. Built for developer Angelo Calori by architects Parr and Fee, it was located in Vancouver’s old Victorian city centre – Gastown. At the time of its construction the CPR was already creating a new downtown a kilometer to the southwest, at what today is Georgia and Granville.
The shape and siting of buildings, and the particular geometry of street grids and building heights, took distinct patterns in different eras. (Today, much of it would fall under the auspices of city planning.) The flatiron shape, a wedge-like structure nestled in the acute angle between two streets, is quintessentially Victorian. Although initially motivated by necessity, the distinct shape gained a romantic cachet with the 1903 publication of Alfred Steiglitz’s beautiful photo of the Flatiron Building in New York City. The six-story Hotel Europe is one of the few Vancouver flatiron buildings built after the shape had become popular. The flatiron buildings along Water and Cordova streets were erected earlier – the result of street grids colliding, rather than of style or aesthetic reasoning.
In a Beaux Arts siting pattern, an “anchor building” would rise up above the surrounding architecture, placed to facilitate vistas in a sort of Western feng shui; viewed from a block or two away, the lower buildings in the foreground would form a natural proscenium. But here at Maple Tree Square, four- and five-story buildings share roughly equal status. The uniform building height and the lack of building vistas make the square typically Victorian.
The hotel’s restrained exterior ornamentation and flat brick walls distinguish it from the more decorated and ornate building style of the older Victorian buildings that surround it. The lobby’s interior design – ornate white tile, golden trim, and marble work resplendent with ostentatious brass fittings – places the lobby firmly within a traditional Victorian architectural vernacular that was prevalent in London and the Channel ports. This style can still be seen today in the oceanfront hotels of Poole, Brighton, and other channel ports.
The use of ironwork pilasters to create the large windows on the bottom floor is typically Victorian; these large windows would have been impossible without the structural iron and steel frames which reduced the load-bearing function of masonry.
The Hotel Europe was one of the earliest reinforced concrete frame structures in Vancouver. It was built by the Ferro-Concrete Construction Company of Ohio, which had built the first sixteen-story-tall concrete building in the world six years earlier in Cincinnati. The hotel advertised itself as “Absolutely Fireproof and Strictly Modern”. Rightfully boastful of its fire-resistant construction, it was the first “fireproof” hotel in Western Canada. The fireproofing was a French invention invented by Joseph Moniers. François Hennebique patented the invention in 1892 and used the catchphrase “plus d’incendies désastreux” (no more disastrous fires) to advertise the steel-and-concrete combination. The technology was instantly popular between 1892 and 1902, over 7,000 such buildings were built in many different countries and its reputation spread.
The Great Vancouver Fire had occurred just a generation earlier and drunken patrons causing fires with their cigars were a ever-present danger in the hotels of BC; the fireproofing made the Europa a particularly attractive Vancouver hotel. Perched at the intersection of two street grids, it now stands at the intersection of two neighbourhoods: trendy, tourist-friendly Gastown, and the deep dark Downtown Eastside. Today, it is the building’s beauty which has made it into one of Vancouver’s iconic heritage structures.
[Next post: The Yale Hotel]
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