The Hotel Europe
43 Powell Street
The 6-storey flatiron building that stands at the convergence of Water, Alexander and Powell Streets is the old
Hotel Europe. It was completed in 1909 and is also known as the Angelo Calori Building after the hotelier
who had it built. It was purposefully situated close to the old steamship docks at the foot of Columbia Street, from which a
bus transferred passengers to the hotel. It is the earliest reinforced concrete structure in Vancouver and was the first
fire-proof hotel in western Canada. To this day, it still has its original Italian tile floors and leaded glass windows.
For its first few years, the Hotel Europe flourished. However, in 1916, the second Hotel Vancouver
opened across town on the south side of West Georgia Street, between Howe and Granville Streets. The popularity of that
newer, grander hotel quickly shifted the heart of the city to the southwest, away from the area that's now known as Gastown.
As a result, the Hotel Europe lost favour and quickly fell into disrepute as a brothel.
In earlier years, the ground floor, which is currently occupied by a poster store, was a restaurant. Beneath the
restaurant was an underground saloon, which was accessed by stairs from the sidewalk entrance at
the apex of the building. This underground area extended beneath the sidewalk on both sides of the building in what
were commonly known as "areaways". Areaways were once a typical feature of commercial buildings in Gastown. They were
used to load and unload freight through trap doors in the sidewalk. The glass tiles that can still be seen in the
sidewalk along Alexander and Powell Streets provided daylight to the underground saloon. The Hotel Europe's
areaways were filled in and bricked up many years ago and, today, what's left of the underground area where the saloon
once was is a storage cellar. The upper floors of the building were converted into subsidized housing units in 1983.
The Hotel Europe houses one ghost for sure and possibly two. The first ghost was reported in the 1980's by a
contractor who was working on some repairs on his own in the cellar, close to a bricked up areaway entrance.
He had left the cellar briefly to fetch something and, when he returned, his tools had been scattered about the floor
by unseen hands. He then heard scratching noises coming from behind the brick wall and felt a bad presence. Frightened by
the experience, he hastily gathered up all of his tools and departed from the cellar as fast as he could, refusing to work
down there again. To this day, scratching noises have been heard coming from the other side of the bricked up areaway in
the cellar. It could be the sounds of rats or mice, of course, but remember - the areaways were all filled in years ago.
The second spirit, who might be the same as the first, is the apparition of a man who occasionally appears in the
poster shop on the street level. One evening in the 1990's, after closing, a store clerk first saw the ghost clearly
reflected in the convex security mirror at the top end of the store, near the apex of the building. She was surprised to
see him as she was sure that the store had been clear of customers when she had locked the door. When she went to
investigate, nobody was there. The man had suddenly and quietly vanished. Shaken by the strange experience, she locked up
and left in a hurry. She also reported seeing the apparition again on another occasion. Whoever the man is, it's likely
that he's confused to find a poster store where his favourite restaurant and watering hole once were! |
