Hotel Europe is a six storey, flatiron style building, built on a pie shaped property located in Historical Gastown, Vancouver BC Canada.
Construction began in 1908 and the hotel was completed and opened in 1909.
It was the first reinforced concrete structure to be built in Canada and the earliest fireproof hotel in Western Canada.
For the first years, the hotel flourished as people arrived to Vancouver by Steamship and stayed at the hotel.
The ground floor was once a beer parlour and is now currently a store. Below this beer parlour was an underground saloon accessible by stairs from a sidewalk entrance.
The underground area, including the saloon is said to have extended under the sidewalks on both sides of the hotel. These extensions were known as “areaways,” a typical feature of buildings in the Gastown area. Areaways were used to load and unload freight through trap doors in the outside sidewalk.
The Hotel Europe’s areaways were eventually filled in and bricked up and the underground saloon is said to be now a storage basement.
A more luxurious, Vancouver hotel opened in 1919 and the guest traffic shifted to the new hotel. At sometime it was said that the Hotel Europe became a brothel.
This building was later renovated into suites and is currently an affordable housing complex.
Rumored haunted. It is believed there is one, possibly two ghosts residing in the Hotel Europe. The first ghost was reported in the early '80s by a contractor who had been working on some repairs alone in the cellar, near the bricked up areaway entrance. Supposedly, he had left the cellar briefly and when he returned he found his tools had been scattered all over the floor. He heard scratching noises coming from behind the brick wall (a wall said to have been previously filled in) and felt a bad presence. He grabbed his tools and fled. Also, reported was a man dressed in a black coat with a flat cap that appeared in the shop on the ground level. One evening in the early 2000's after the shop owner had closed the store, the owner saw a man/ghost clearly reflected in the convex security mirror at the top end of the store. She was surprised to see him as she was sure there were no customers left in the store when she locked up. When she went to investigate, there was nobody there. The man in the mirror had vanished. The owner was left shaken and fled the property. This man/ghost was reported to return again at a later date.
It is questioned if this was the same original ghost or indeed a second one.
**Please note: All enclosed information has been collected from various online sources and has not been verified to be true or accurate.
Thank-you for visiting
~Christie by the River
