Stanley Park Manor:
a Collective History
Stanley Park Manor: a Collective History brings together dozens of voices and hundreds of lives lived in one of the West End’s most iconic buildings. With previous tenants such as Pierre Berton, Simma Holt, Kiran Singh, Abbas Akhavan, Jennifer Spence, Joel Sturrock, Trish Klein (of the Be Good Tanyas) and congregations of others piling up to the present, this almost 100-year-old Vancouver building is steeped in stories. With the help of previous building manager Lyn Guy, Manor-resident and author Kevin Spenst has compiled, researched and added to accounts from actors, artists, journalists and hosts of others. An array of Spenst’s lyric essays and in-suite interviews with his neighbours weave through the dozens of personal accounts from others (and photos galore!) making up this hybrid collection that’s part walking tour through the building’s generations of tenants, and part museum of miscellany and magic. An ode to the poetics of coincidence and community, Gathered Together traces a few of the arcs of history and celebrates the power of people coming together. This compendium of trust reflects upon the nature of home and healing from the inside out.
Kevin Spenst with Lyn Guy, Kevin Dale McKeown, Elsie K. Neufeld, Alfred DePew, Kiran Singh, Shannon Pawliw, Trish Klein, Susan Steudel, Elinor Warkentin, Kajola Morewood, Greg Dickson, Lori Kittelberg, Serene Porter, Jane Sawyer, Andrea Nunes, Rob Arseneau, Joel Sturrock, Rob Duncan, Jacquelyn Miller, Jennifer Spence, Anji Smith, and hosts upon hosts of others
Advance Praise
“STANLEY PARK MANOR: A COLLECTIVE HISTORY is a kaleidoscopic, big-hearted tribute to a building and the people who have lived there. With its collage of photos, vignettes, interviews, lyric essays, personal stories and correspondence, this book provides a rich and dazzling history of Vancouver’s West End—in turns gritty, troubled, charming, and soulful—through a lens of warm curiosity. In a time when people so often don’t know their neighbours, Spenst depicts a place with real community, where the people next door are so much more than strangers. ”
—Shashi Bhat author of Death by a Thousand Cuts
“Stanley Park Manor, with its stately courtyard entrance, its glorious gardens, and with all its heritage, landmark trappings, is one of the West End’s most intriguing and romantic buildings. Locals and tourists alike, passing by, stop to wonder about its history, its hauntings; wonder about the century’s worth of its floor-by-floor goings-on. So many years. So many lives. If only those walls could talk. Now, thanks to the determined sleuthing of Kevin Spenst, they do. The stories they tell are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes scandalous, sometimes mysterious, and always compelling. Stanley Park Manor is a fascinating history of a building, a neighbourhood, and a city. ”
—Bill Richardson author of I Saw Three Ships: West End Stories
“A grand and glorious dame of a building finally gets her closeup in Kevin Spenst’s compendium of stories, memories, and conversation in Stanley Park Manor: A Collective History. Located west of Denman in Vancouver’s storied West End neighbourhood, the Manor is a living embodiment of the City’s social and cultural history. Over the years, she has provided a home for a scintillating variety of writers, artists and eccentrics, who have fashioned a truly iconoclastic enclave. Garrulous, funny and stuffed full of wild tales, not unlike the tenants themselves, Spenst’s book is a suitable ode to a place and its people.”
— Dorothy Woodend Culture Editor for The Tyee
VIDEO: Stanley Park Manor: a Collective History – book trailer
