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The American Hotel: Vancouver’s latest Main Street transformation converts gang hangout to artsy bar

May 26th, 2011 · 12 Comments

Hard to mourn the American Hotel and its bar that died in 2006, unless you were into super-cheap blocks of stolen cheese, cocaine, motorcycle gangs, grunge or all of the above.

Its replacement — a cleaned-up hotel with a new izakaya-themed bar below, the Electric Owl — is definitely a step up without going all the way to hyper-gentrification in this rapidly changing Chinatown/Downtown Eastside corridor. Some will still see it as the thin edge, I’m sure.

The Owl opens this week. Not sure when the hotel’s 49 rooms will be rented out. But definitely a big change for this spot on Main, opposite the Cobalt that used to be the epicentre of punk and leather.

 

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