Hotel Canada and Holy Rosary Cathedral, Downtown Vancouver

Hotel Canada's faded wall sign at 518 Richards Street sits below the spires of Holy Rosary Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. Glass towers have filled most of the space around them, but the old hotel lettering and the cathedral cross still manage to find a way through.

The Canada Hotel opened in 1913, designed by Emil Guenther for T.B. Hyndman. For a relatively ordinary downtown hotel, somebody had ambitions. Architectural research records its dining room as a replica of the one at New York's Waldorf-Astoria.

The sales pitch became more practical with time. A Hotel Canada advertisement running in a Nanaimo newspaper in 1928 promised courteous service and comfort to travellers coming over to Vancouver. Another the following year advertised modern spring mattresses, hot water, winter rates and even offered to pay for the guest's bus or taxi from arrival. Luxury is a flexible concept.

The name disappeared in 1937, first for the Merritt Gordon Hotel and then, from 1941, the Marble Arch. That version of the building developed a different sort of reputation. Its beer parlour became a strip club, Mötley Crüe later included the Marble Arch among the clubs named in Girls, Girls, Girls, and by the end of the century the old hotel was in considerably rougher shape than its Waldorf aspirations might have suggested. After a major provincial SRO renovation completed in 2014, it became the Hotel Canada again.

Behind it, Holy Rosary has been working on permanence since 1900. Its original seven bells were cast in Savoy, France, shipped to Vancouver, and promptly discovered to be badly out of tune. They went back across the world to England, some were melted down and recast, and eight returned in their place. On July 1, 1911, ringers completed 5,040 changes in just under three hours, recorded as Canada's first full peal.

None of that is particularly obvious from here.

A bit of old paint. Two zinc spires. A cross above the condos.

Enough to work with.