Hotel Strathcona Ghost Sign, West Hastings Street, Vancouver

The faded Hotel Strathcona ghost sign on Vancouver's West Hastings Street still survives on the brick side wall of the Paris Block at 51–53 West Hastings. In this 2018 view, it sits below a jumble of Downtown Eastside rooftops, with the industrial waterfront and North Shore Mountains stacked behind it.

Some signs survive because somebody saves them. This one survived because, for a very long time, nobody built high enough next door.

There is a pleasingly Vancouver chain of events behind it. Developer John F. Deeks had made money hydraulic-mining gold at Pine Creek near Atlin. The building was intended in part for the commercial travellers and resource-industry workers moving through the young city. Then, in 1919, Pierre Paris & Sons moved into the ground floor and made a reputation selling boots to loggers and miners. Gold money in the bricks. Beds upstairs. Logging boots downstairs. 

The wall eventually became advertising archaeology. Old photographs show huge Pierre Paris lettering sharing the brick with the Strathcona Hotel sign, one generation of paint bleeding through another. By the time the hotel itself disappeared, the words had acquired the useful habit of refusing to leave. The Strathcona had actually been vacant since May 1974. More than thirty years later it still carried 56 officially designated SRA rooms on paper, until a heritage conversion turned the building into live-work strata units and retail space. 

The wall survived that too.

Its next problem is much simpler: somebody finally needs the space beside it.

The old low-rise building at 55 West Hastings came down in 2025. Construction is now underway on a ten-storey building with retail below and 32 secured market-rental homes above, immediately beside the Paris Block. The first version was designed by Gair Williamson, the same architect involved in rehabilitating the Paris Block years earlier. Urban West Architecture later took over the project. City of Vancouver Permits

There is one particularly good piece of bureaucratic comedy buried in the planning documents. Concerned that the new building's exposed side walls might remain visible for a long time, the City suggested a mural or decorative banding.

Next door was already a wall with a hundred years of Vancouver painted into it. 

As construction rises at 55 West Hastings, the old Hotel Strathcona sign is set to disappear from public view. Perhaps the lettering will remain there in the dark, sandwiched between two buildings, doing remarkably well for paint nobody can see.

The paint may survive. The view won't.