The basement bar of a 1960s motor hotel became Vancouver's indie living room. The Biltmore Cabaret at 395 Kingsway opened more than fifty years ago as the resident pub of the Biltmore Hotel at the awkward junction of Kingsway and 12th in Mount Pleasant, and spent decades cycling through aliases and reputations - by the 2000s it was a genuinely rough room where police lined up outside on weekends. In 2007 Zak Pashak, the Calgary promoter behind Broken City and the Sled Island festival, took it ov.....

The Chinatown Storytelling Centre is a small museum in the heart of Vancouver's historic Chinatown that gathers and shares the stories of Chinese Canadians, from the first immigrants who arrived in the nineteenth century to the communities of today, through personal accounts, photographs, artefacts and multimedia displays. Opened in 2021, the centre was created to preserve and pass on a history that had often gone untold, presenting the experiences of the men who came to work in the gold fields.....

In the heart of Vancouver's Chinatown lies the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, the first authentic full-scale classical Chinese scholar's garden built outside China, a walled enclosure of ponds, pavilions, rocks and plants that recreates the tranquil retreats favoured by the cultivated elite of the Ming dynasty. Opened in 1986 and named after the revered figure regarded as the father of modern China, who visited Canada in his years of revolutionary activity, the garden was a remarkabl.....

False Creek is a narrow inlet of the sea that reaches into the centre of Vancouver, separating the downtown peninsula from the neighbourhoods to the south and forming one of the defining features of the city's geography, its sheltered waters ringed by a near-continuous seawall walkway that has become a favourite route for walking, running and cycling. The name was given by a naval captain who, exploring the coast in the nineteenth century, found that the waterway he had hoped was a true creek ca.....

FlyOver Canada is a flight-simulation attraction at Canada Place on the Vancouver waterfront that gives visitors the sensation of soaring across the country, suspended before a vast spherical screen as wind, mist and scents are added to the moving images to create a vivid illusion of flight. Opened in 2013 in a former IMAX cinema, it was the first of what has grown into an international family of similar rides, and it was inspired by the simulated flight attractions pioneered at major theme par.....

The dance floor sits where the dim sum carts of Ming's once rolled - one of Chinatown's most storied restaurants became one of Vancouver's most influential clubs. Fortune Sound Club, upstairs at 147 East Pender Street in a 1921 building, opened in 2009 when promoters Garret "GMan" Louie and Rob Rizk of Blueprint Events converted the former Ming's Restaurant space into a 450-capacity room built around a custom Funktion-One sound system. Fortune arrived as Chinatown's reinvention was beginning an.....

It took, in the new owners' words, "a lot of cleaning": for thirty years 2321 Main Street was the Fox Cinema, reputedly the last full-time 35mm adult-film theatre in North America, before reopening in 2014 as one of Vancouver's best-loved independent venues. The Fox Cabaret sits in the heart of Mount Pleasant, in a building whose retail lives date to the early 1900s. The address became a movie house in the mid-1970s as the Empire Cinema, ran as the art-house Savoy from 1980 - Rocky Horror and 3.....

The largest free-span timber roof on the planet now arcs over Hastings Park - Vancouver built its first major new amphitheatre in six decades and crowned it in wood. The Freedom Mobile Arch, at 2901 East Hastings Street on the Pacific National Exhibition fairgrounds, opened on 5 June 2026, replacing the humble PNE Amphitheatre - a "temporary" structure from the 1960s that had somehow served for sixty years. Revery Architecture's design is the headline: a mass-timber canopy of roughly 900 tons o.....

Gastown is the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver, the place where the city began, a district of red-brick warehouses, cobblestone streets and Victorian commercial buildings that has been restored and revived into one of the most atmospheric quarters of the modern city. Its origins lie in a riverside saloon opened in 1867 by a talkative steamboat captain named John Deighton, nicknamed Gassy Jack for his endless stories, around whose establishment a small settlement grew that took the name Gastown.....

Led Zeppelin used it as a North American base of operations in the early 1970s, Jimi Hendrix played it nine months after it opened, and the Canucks called it home for a quarter century. The Pacific Coliseum, at 100 North Renfrew Street on the Pacific National Exhibition grounds in Vancouver, opened on 8 January 1968 and remains the city's hardest-working arena. The building is a piece of 1960s Formalism: architect W.K. Noppe's circular bowl with its distinctive ring of white panels cost 6 milli.....