West Pender meets Abbot street on the narrow land bridge that connects downtown Vancouver to the rest of the mainland. It’s a meeting of boundaries: Cross Abbot walking east along Hastings;you’ll find yourself in the Downtown Eastside. Cross Abbot south of Pender, though, and the light posts change shape — short posts painted bright red mark Chinatown. These neighborhoods are distinct in identity and in culture, but they flow and mix along the borderlines. In places like Abbot and West Pender where they meld into something new, there are buildings like the Lotus Hotel. It’s not ostentatious; no dramatic crenelations mark it out against the Woodwards building or the Sun Tower down the street. Maybe its unassuming decor allowed the Lotus to wear its many faces: luxury hotel, bootlegger haunt, AIDS hospice, and queer haven — it’s been all of them once.
Now it’s one of Vancouver’s infamous single room occupancy housing units, a symptom of a city that has neglected its duty in caring for and funding citizens struggling with homelessness and addiction. Like many SRO buildings, management of the Lotus has changed hands frequently in recent years. The current landlord is DPM rentals, a North Van based real estate company who, according to two former residents of the Lotus, have all but abandoned the building. Both complained of their neighbors hoarding, and of inaction from management when they brought up their issues. “DPM refused to staff anyone on site… The Lotus became horrifically unlivable by the time [I moved out]” said Miles, who lived in the building for a year while going to school in the area. I reached out to DPM rentals for comment and got no response.
But the Lotus wasn’t always this way. Visitors in the early 20th century, enticed by full page ads in local publications boasting of the hotel’s latest amenities, were greeted by suited bellhops and escorted down mahogany-lined halls, provided with Havana cigars to smoke in luxury rooms. So how did an establishment consistently listed in the Province newspaper’s ‘best hotels’ column throughout the ‘10s and ‘20s become what it is today?
The land where the Lotus now stands lies within the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and 200 years ago, was submerged by the waters of the Burrard Inlet at high tide. Indigenous mariners used the area as a portage route, a temporary waterway between False Creek and the Inlet. The water they plied in cedar canoes has since been replaced by the cement foundations of a modern city. The transformation is unthinkable to me, even with decades of sources and documentation on its development.
The change began in earnest with the railroad and the theft of indigenous land that came with it. Thousands of people were expelled from their homelands, starved by the new scarcity that settlers brought along the rails and ravaged by their new diseases. In 1886 the Canadian Pacific Railway company announced that it would extend its rail line from Port Moody to the township of Granville (modern day Gastown). The town was renamed Vancouver after the first British explorer to arrive in the area and incorporated as a city.
Some sources place Loo Gee Wing, merchant and principle figure in early 20th century Chinese-Canadian commerce, as an early investor in the Lotus Hotel’s 1913 construction. He doesn’t seem to have had much input in the hotel’s business after its construction, but his legacy in the development of downtown Vancouver and British Columbia as a whole are fascinating, so I’m going to talk about him — and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. Loo was described by the Province in one of his many court appearances as, “like a tailor’s model in the suit of a prosperous Englishman down to his patent leathers.”
He took over the largest Chinese import-export company in BC, Kwong Lee & Co. from his father in 1887. He quickly became one of the wealthiest men in Chinatown, and his company grew to be the largest landowner in Victoria after the Hudson Bay company. Kwong Lee & Co. demonstrates perfectly the integral role Chinese-Canadians played in building British Columbia and is too vast to tackle here. I’d recommend Tzu-i Chung’s paper “Kwong Lee & Company and Early Trans-Pacific Trade” for anyone interested in a more in depth look.
Canada in the 19th century was not a welcoming place to Chinese immigrants, and Loo, like many in the face of a hostile society bent on preventing one’s success by legitimate means, often operated outside the boundaries of the law. All this to say, he was kind of a mob boss. Records of Loo are saturated with tales of crime and evasion, painting a picture of a shrewd, complicated figure instrumental to shaping the identity, if not of the Lotus Hotel in particular, then of downtown Vancouver as a whole.
Whoever truly fronted the cash for the Lotus’ construction, Arthur J. Bird, architect of many turn-of-the-century Vancouver high rises and municipal buildings, drafted the plans. His design of the Lotus Hotel in 1913 was a private contract, but Bird would go on to become Vancouver’s first (and only) official city architect in 1925. Over 60 building permits in Heritage Vancouver’s archives list him as the primary architect. Bird became the subject of some tension in local governance in the 1920s when he warned officials of a growing crisis in “the district immediately east of Main Street.” He recommended the city build high-density affordable housing in the area to accommodate the rising number of people moving into the city for work. They ignored him, and Bird was dismissed from his position in 1933 after a feud with the alderman. Now the Lotus, one of Bird’s most notable works, has been acquired by companies like DPM rentals to exploit the very people that its architect fought to protect.
Before all that, though, Bird got to enjoy his moment in the sun when the Lotus Hotel held its grand opening on the first of March, 1913. A full double page ad ran in both the Sun newspaper and the Province sounded the fanfare for this new “marvel of modern equipment, elegance, and luxury.” Entirely fire-proof, equipped with a sixty-foot mahogany bar and oaken beds of “Napoleonic design,” the Lotus, despite changing owners multiple times, maintained its lofty reputation throughout the 1910s. It didn’t last long. Hints started to show as early as the ‘20s. In March of 1924, two Liquor Board agents posed as bootleggers and arrested James Leader for attempting to sell them counterfeit liquor labels. Multiple arrests of Lotus liquor sellers made local newspapers.
In 1930, thirty-two pounds of opium (worth over $300,000 today) were seized by police in a Lotus room. Wong Yam Mui, a crewmate on a docked Russian freighter, was arrested in the raid and sentenced to five years for smuggling. The Lotus’ cloak and dagger underbelly paints the picture of a high class establishment that, for one reason or another, was tasting grit. Maybe impermanent management teams were willing to look the other way, or the hotel’s prime location — minutes away from the harbour — made smuggling a foregone conclusion. Either way, the stains were starting to show: in 1936, an article in The Globe and Mail referred to the hotel as “modest, clean… inexpensive.” Not a fall from grace, but a far cry from its lofty origins.
By the 1940s organized crime, at least at the Lotus, seemed to be on a downtick. Reports of illegal liquor sales and drug smuggling all but disappear, and the big time crooks get replaced by small scale robberies and acts of violence: In ’44, a burglar jumped through the hotel bar’s windowpane; two years later, a seventy-five-year-old man got in a fight and was pushed through the very same window. The many thefts and hold-ups in the hotel, along with a decrease in reports of high-profile guests and events, are consistent with the socioeconomic decline of the Downtown Eastside as a whole. Canada’s resource extraction and manufacturing industries began to decline just before WWII, leaving working class residents of Vancouver’s oldest neighborhood with less work and worse pay. On top of that, downtown industries were relocating further west towards Coal Harbour, and demand for migrant workers was dropping fast. In context, the Lotus finds a place in the story of its city, feeling the same pain as the people next door.
But the Lotus wasn’t going down without a fight. In 1955, just two years after a patron shot two revolver rounds into the bar’s ceiling, co-owner Sammy Kee opened the Lotus Gardens dining room for business on the ground floor. A large ad in The Province harkens back to the hotel’s original banner from 1913, boasting of a “modern […] beautiful new dining lounge.” The restaurant is described in the same newspaper’s food column only five years later as “a meeting place for many newspapermen, writers, and artists,” by this point it seems to have become something of a downtown hub. Kee’s rejuvenation of the Lotus, alongside co-owner Lila Chen, seemed to have worked. There’s not much information on Kee outside his proprietorship of the Lotus and the Lions, another old hotel turned SRO on Powell street, but his care and labour on the places he built exists in the digitised memory of Vancouver. The Lotus Gardens is gone, gutted and built over. But you and I know it existed.
The coming decades took their toll: management filed for bankruptcy in ‘76; the hotel was put on the market. By 1980 it saw two more shootings, a bar-fight stabbing, and a failed heroin bust come and go, and Sammy Kee died at 79 in ‘84. The exploitative tendencies that would grip the place began to show: spurred on by the 1986 World Fair, hotels and SROs all over the city upgraded their rooms and inflated prices, seeing dollar signs in a tourism boom. The Lotus hiked rent from $225 a month to $50 a day and evicted 40 tenants.
A few years later, Abbot street would settle into its new identity as the centre of what Lotus bar manager Esther Wilson would call years later “Vancouver’s alternative nightlife culture.” The hotel was under new management, and they weren’t interested in the glow of days gone by. In the ‘90s, the hotel put on cabarets and was one of the city’s first hospice shelters for HIV positive Vancouverites during the AIDS epidemic. By ‘98, the building’s queer identity was there to stay; the bars on the ground floor were well established queer clubs. In 2000, restaurateur Mark James bought and renovated the building, briefly renaming it the Abbott-at-Pender Heritage House. Catchy right? Patrons must have thought so too; within a year the old name was back. But James gave more to the Lotus than simply a name which didn’t stick: the multimillionaire assumed management with a specific mandate to maintain a queer-friendly space downtown, and held this principle above profit. It allowed the hotel’s clubs to keep their doors open to low-income patrons for a fraction of the price charged by the ones on the Granville strip.
When it reopened after renovations in 2002, the Lotus hosted Mod meetings and drag shows in its nightclubs — the Honey and Lotus Sound Lounges — and by 2003 boasted the hotel’s greatest claim to fame in over a century of existence: Vancouver’s first and, at the time, only lesbian bar: Lick Club. Rebranded from the previously gay-coded Milk Club in a corner of the ground floor, Lick quickly became a place of more importance and value to Vancouver’s lesbian and trans communities than I have the space or perspective to cover here, and that means it’s time for homework. Professor and former Lick Club DJ Maren Hancock’s 2017 dancecult article “Lick My Legacy” covers the bar’s history in more depth, and records touching personal accounts of the venue from patrons and members of the community. I’d recommend it highly to anyone interested in learning more about this integral piece of Vancouver’s queer identity.
In 2011, Mark James sold the Lotus Hotel. Its new owners closed the clubs on the ground floor and leased the space out to independent businesses. The Honey Lounge, Lotus Sound Lounge, and Lick closed shortly thereafter. The age of drag shows, top surgery fundraisers, and Mod club Fridays at the Lotus was over. After a stormy decade of sales and resales, the ground floor of the Lotus now hosts a large sports bar, the Pint. Their website has no mention of the historic space that they occupy, and no one I spoke to there knew much about it. But there’s plaque on the Abbott Street wall. It tells the story of Lick in brief. The supplanting of queer spaces is a sadly common story in cities around the world, and it hurts to see it play out here in Vancouver.
But the Lotus Hotel was built to be a temporary home. It was loved and laboured over, breathed and bled in by people who remain now only in the memories of their loved ones and the pages of old newspapers. Loo Gee Wing, Arthur Bird, and Sammy Kee are dead, Maren Hancock and her fellow veterans of Lick have all moved on. The building at 455 Abbott Street is in another period of obscurity; it’s still mentioned in local papers now and again, and I’m sure the Pint does well enough on Friday nights, but DPM rentals’ handling of the rooms is troubling, and unfortunately typical. The Lotus is not a beacon of luxury in the heart of downtown run by Chinese Canadian trailblazers; it doesn’t host a vibrant, queer-friendly nightclub complex. But it still houses hundreds of residents, provides a fun night out for those with a bit of money in their pockets, and remembers what it used to be.