The Lee Building Centennial Celebration

On July 15th, the Lee Building will ring in its 100th year with a special event at the Heritage Hall in Vancouver’s beautiful Mount Pleasant. The celebration will feature special guest speakers Donald Luxton, President of Heritage Vancouver and Bruce Macdonald, author of the historical atlas Vancouver: A Visual History. The granddaughter of Mr. Herbert Lee, Tracy Forsyth and the lively Celtic folk group Blackthorn will perform live entertainment. Local businesses French Made Baking, Swiss Bakery and Bonchaz will provide complimentary refreshments.

At the turn of the century, Mount Pleasant’s real estate boom brought about the transformation of 9th Avenue into Broadway and Westminster Avenue into Main Street. In 1911 Mr. Herbert Lee, owner of H.O. Lee grocery at 2425 Main Street (currently F as in Frank Clothing), grabbed a part of the action and built the Lee Building at 175 E Broadway, a seven-storey office and apartment block that was the tallest building south of False Creek. As a symbol of the growing prosperity of the area, the building stood proudly on the newly renamed corner.

Dora Kirstiuk, a resident of the Lee Building for 45 years, paid sixty-five dollars a month for her apartment in 1963, where she could watch the ferries scoot across false creek, view the snow-capped North-shore Mountains and enjoy the fireworks on second beach.

The Lee Building continues to dominate the busy corner of Broadway and Main as a proud symbol of Mount Pleasant’s history. In honour of its legacy we invite the public to attend the Lee Building’s Centennial Celebration on Sunday July 15th from 11am-3pm at the Heritage Hall, 3102 Main Street.