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HM: And what about the Perry Hotel.

DG: That’s one of the saddest and hardest projects. That’s where I got my feet wet with working with a major institution for historic preservation. It was a difficult land use issue. I had to do the best with what I had at the time and unfortunately its one of those sad cases where we had a piece of property on First Hill that was stunningly beautiful and had been built with innovative building techniques. Typically the rebar runs up and down, but it wasn’t built like that. It was actually built with bands of steel that were deliberately curved in different ways. The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart essentially took off one wall of the building to put up the Cabrini Tower, then they added a hospital wing off to one side, and then they did a lot of extensive changes.
In some places it was absolutely solid. You couldn’t take a drill to it, it was that strong. In other places, it was crumbling. Unfortunately, no one had access to the original building plans which would have made a huge difference because when they got to tearing the building down they realized it had a double foundation. They ended up taking jack hammers to take it down. If we had known about that, that it had an extra support structure, it would have made all the difference in the world, but we didn’t have that information at the time.

The Sisters had a plan for development of the property, but because of religious politics, everything had to be approved through Rome at the time. This meant the development languished forever.

Most people aren’t aware of some facts about the Perry. Sam Hill of the Northern Railroad actually lived there, as did William Boeing. A number of important people were associated with that building. And the building had huge religious value because of Mother Cabrini’s association and her sainthood. The Perry Hotel was important to Mother Cabrini, it was her last purchase. Some say she never stepped foot in the building, but I kind of find that hard to believe because she was up here, and at the Cathedral.

We managed to save a lot of the terra cotta artifacts off the building. They’re sitting in a yard, basically, on plats, so a lot of that stuff is available. It’s supposed to go on a new building, but that fell through. I don’t know what’s going to happen. They proposed with LIHI to put up a low-income housing project there, but there are a lot of problems with that particular project.

The likes of Shadows and Breathless had yet to even play Vancouver in 1963 when Larry Kent, a then-26year-old college student, decided to make a feature with $5,000 and a handful of friends. That feature, The Bitter Ash, tells the story of a cynical working stiff and a struggling, self-deluded playwright whose lives collide. The film combines the best elements of 1950s Canadian B-movies and presents them in a way that is still fresh and believable four decades later. A raucous jazz soundtrack adds to the film’s edgy feel. Seldom shown since its debut, The Bitter Ash makes a pointed rebuttal to anyone who thinks of Canada in the early ’60s as comfy-sweatered and tragically unhip. Print courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.