Flint Hotel at 1516 Powell Street, Vancouver

The Flint Hotel at 1516 Powell Street is a four-storey Vancouver rooming house built in 1912 for real-estate investor Samuel Flack, but the name on its front door appears to belong to the building that once stood next door. For most of its first decades, this was Manvers Lodge, then the Terminal Hotel, then the Wicklow Rooms. 

The building was designed by Townsend & Townsend for Flack at a reported cost of $50,000. Under the white paint in this photograph is the original red brick. Above it are three storeys of projecting bay windows and a cornice substantial enough to suggest that somebody expected Powell Street to notice. 

Flack himself had come some distance by then. In the 1891 census, he turns up as a Vancouver streetcar conductor. He moved into real estate, eventually running Flack Estate and Investments, and died in 1928 with his obituary calling him a pioneer real-estate broker. Confusingly, he kept his office in the Flack Block downtown, while apparently having no family connection to Thomas Flack, who built it. Vancouver was already perfectly capable of making its archival research unnecessarily difficult. 

His Powell Street investment opened as Manvers Lodge, offering furnished suites. It held on to the name for a while: Henderson's 1923 city directory still lists Manvers Lodge exactly here at 1516 Powell. By 1930, it had become the Terminal Hotel, and by 1940, the Wicklow Rooms. 

Then, somewhere along the way, Jesse P. Flint got involved without actually getting involved.

Flint was an early settler and landowner in what became Port Coquitlam, where Flint Avenue still carries his name. He later owned a Vancouver rooming house. But the J.P. Flint Rooming was 1514 Powell, immediately west of this building. City directories place it there from 1909 into the 1920s. The current building seems to have inherited the neighbour's name sometime later, although the exact moment when Flint crossed from one address to the other remains elusive.

The Wicklow was still providing cheap rooms decades later, and not especially well. When a $200,000 renovation was completed in 1978, the Vancouver Sun spoke with John Brown, a 71-year-old retired welder who had lived there on and off for years. Before the work, he remembered bad plumbing, unreliable heat and cockroaches. Afterward, he was paying $95 a month for a refurbished room while living on a pension of about $200. 

There have been more renovations, more operators and more paperwork since. BC Housing now counts 97 supportive-housing units at the Flint. The original brick is painted white. Some windows have had better decades than others. The building is still full of rooms.