Regal Place – Hastings Street between Cambie and Abbott, Vancouver, British Columbia

Regal Place is an eight-storey Edwardian commercial building built in 1908 to house the Vancouver Stock Exchange, which had been created the year before "to provide a source of risk capital for the resource companies of Western Canada to help develop the burgeoning mining industry in that area." (The founders felt that the major stock exchanges in eastern Canada would not be willing to finance the somewhat risky resource-based enterprises in the west.) The building also housed financial agents, accountants, real estate agents, and architects.

Despite outward appearances of earlier design, it was among the most advanced buildings of their time, using steel girders and concrete in their structural systems.

As the business centre shifted to the former Canadian Pacific Railway lands to the west, the financial tenants left this building and it was used for a succession of smaller businesses. In 1917, this became the home of the Province newspaper, which started in Victoria then came to Vancouver (before it moved to its new headquarters at 198 West Hastings Street).

In the 1920s the arcade retail store took over the main floor, and the building next door, and the elaborate arched entrance was lost. By the 1930s it was called the Ray Building, the offices were a much broader range of professions with a number of doctors, but almost no financial or real estate companies, and no architects at all.

In 1956 "Handsome Harry" Hooper, Vancouver’s first cab driver (owner of a wheezy two-cylinder Ford in 1903) died, aged 81, while living in his "office" in the building. His residential use of the building pre-dated its official conversion to Single Room Occupancy in 1983.

Now renamed Regal Place, this building has been renovated by the Metro Vancouver Housing Society by the addition of bathrooms and kitchens to each unit. Since the year 2000, it has been operated by the Portland Hotel Society and provides 39 housing units. The residents are adults attempting to move away from substance misuse. Still in need of some external TLC, (and a its fabulous lost cornice!) the building functions as a significant slender beacon on the street.