End of an era: Motel revamped as art studios will be torn down for highrises

A brightly coloured throwback to the 1950s, the City Centre Motor Hotel, with its distinctive signage and architecture on Vancouver's Main Street, has been a landmark for decades.

During the past few years, it's been used as a studio space for artists. And now it will be torn down to make way for two highrise apartments.

City councillors voted on Thursday to rezone the site at 2111 Main St. to allow Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership to build a 22-storey and a 24-storey building, with 20 per cent of the units to be rented below market rates.

The developer promised city council it will include more than 5,000 square feet of cultural amenity space as part of the redevelopment, which will be turnkey and given to the city once the project is completed.

However, one of the resident artists at the City Centre is concerned about the looming loss of over 70 artists' spaces, saying they offered an affordable place to work at a time when that is a rarity in ultra-expensive Vancouver.

"The motel is a really great alternative to ... a full rent storefront," said ceramics artist Kate Metten. "And having, like, a lower rent, smaller space gives me more room to experiment in my work and be less commercial with my practice." 

WATCH | City Centre Motor Hotel to be torn down: 

Vancouver's funky City Centre Motor Hotel to be demolished

2 days ago

Duration 2:00

It looks like a throwback to 1950s hospitality, but Vancouver's funky City Centre Motor Hotel has become something of a haven for artists. The former lodgings on Main Street have been affordable artist studios since 2022. But now council has approved its tear-down and redevelopment. As Liam Britten reports, craftspeople say that’s a problem in a city where finding a room is tough.

The City Centre art spaces, which opened in 2022, have enabled her to make pottery without falling foul of noise bylaws, advance her ceramic business and to experiment in oil painting, all while being surrounded by other artists.

"It's so hard to find spaces in Vancouver for artists that are, you know, not $3,000 or $4,000 a month," she said.

"I require a lot of electricity as a potter. And so I would be looking for an industrial space. And there's just a huge shortage of industrial spaces in Vancouver."

The building's operator told CBC News that artists like Metten will have at least one more year to run their studios at the motel but he expects a longer timeline.

Rezoning part of Broadway Plan

The rezoning vote that passed on Thursday was part of the Broadway Plan, a large-scale planning project for the Broadway stretch that will look to increase housing density around an ongoing SkyTrain extension project.

Developers Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership has promised it will look to maintain the iconic City Centre signage in some form, and have cultural amenity space suitable for artists who need bigger areas to work.

City staff said it recommended the rezoning based on the cultural space that was included, which will be handed to the city and is part of a strategy to provide cultural spaces if existing ones are at risk of displacement.

However, artists in the city have been raising the alarm over the loss of artistic spaces for years.

In 2019, the Eastside Arts Society produced a report that estimated 400,000 square feet of artist production space was lost over the previous 10 years.

Esther Rausenberg, art director and executive director of the Eastside Arts Society, told CBC News in 2023 that an additional 50,000 to 60,000 square feet of artist space had been lost in the intervening four years.

WATCH | Artists raise alarm over lack of government funding: 

Amid upsurge in Canadian patriotism, artists say time is ripe for more arts funding

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Michelle Chawla, CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts, and Esther Rausenberg, executive director at the Eastside Culture Crawl, say that arts funding from all three levels of government hasn't kept up with the rate of inflation.

"One of the things that we're seeing is this real, real crunch at the moment where [arts] funding has not really grown with … the population growth," she told CBC News last week.

"I put a lot of the blame, you know, squarely on all three levels of government who have not increased funds and in fact, in some cases really decreased funds — because they haven't even been increased at the rate of inflation," she added.

The city is aware of the challenges, a spokesperson said. 

"With accelerated development, rapidly rising industrial and commercial land values, Vancouver is experiencing rapid loss of affordable places for artists to live, work, and share their work." 

In response to this, in September 2019 the city set a goal to create 800,000 square feet of new or renewed cultural space by 2029.

To date, the city has reached 70 per cent of that goal, the spokesperson said. In addition, they are working with the Eastside Arts Society to create an arts district in East Vancouver.