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Building History

Priteca's Vancouver, BC, Pantages Theatre seated approximately 1,800 when it opened on 06/01/1917. (Historian David Naylor, in his American Picture Palaces The Architecture of Fantasy, [New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1981, p. 216], noted that the Pantages seated 1,600.) At this time, the architect was busy designing theatres for the vaudeville producer up and down the Pacific Coast. This was the second Pantages Theatre in Vancouver, both located on Hastings Street.

Demolition

The 1967 demolition of the Pantages Theatre infuriated many in Vancouver, BC, and helped to galvanize the historic preservation movement in the city. (The architect of the earlier 1907 Pantages, also on Hastings Street, was Edward Evans Blackmore. Unfortunately, after the demolition of the Pantages Theatre #1 in 2011, the preservation movement developed cracks thereafter.)

In later years, a multi-story hotel building was erected at 20 West Hastings Street. In 2018, it operated as the Portland Hotel, a service of the Portland Community Services Society. This group said of the hotel on its web site: "The Portland Hotel, named after PHS’s first hotel, provides 88 units of supported housing for some of the city’s most challenging and historically hard-to-house individuals. The Portland has contributed towards bringing stability into the lives of many individuals who were at one time considered to be “at risk” and homeless. The majority of Portland residents are living with physical and mental health issues, substance dependencies and other challenges – often concurrently. Opened in 1999 as the first purpose-built housing project designed specifically to meet the unique needs of Vancouver’s hard-to-house community, The Portland offers perhaps the most comprehensive support of all the PHS projects. Staff are committed to providing a safe and stable, judgment-free home for all residents, based around the idea of a 'therapeutic family.'" (See PHS Community Services.com, "The Portland Hotel," accessed 03/19/2018.)

PCAD id: 15138