Heart Attack

After more than a century of caring for Vancouver, the city’s first hospital building — the Heather Pavilion — is once again under threat. Despite its heritage designation and past promises of restoration, redevelopment plans for the Vancouver General Hospital campus have cast doubt on its future. The building’s uncertain survival has reignited concern among heritage advocates and residents alike.

Designed by the architectural firm Grant & Henderson, the Heather Pavilion opened in 1906 as the first major structure of Vancouver General Hospital. This solid-granite Romanesque revival building was once the most modern hospital in Western Canada, its “pavilion plan” layout praised as the future of health care.

For decades, the pavilion anchored both Vancouver’s skyline and its sense of community while serving as the area’s first nursing school. When later additions swallowed it whole, few realized the original building was still 90 per cent intact — a discovery made by heritage advocates in the early 1990s during redevelopment studies. “Once thought lost in a series of additions, the Heather Pavilion still stands as a heritage-designated building,” former city councillor Marguerite Ford said in a 2024 interview with the Heather Heritage Society. 

In 1994, as redevelopment plans threatened to demolish or permanently encase the structure, residents formed the society to advocate for its protection. Their campaign led to the pavilion’s 2002 municipal heritage designation. But amid ongoing hospital expansion— driven by population growth and modernization — those commitments may be sidelined. And the fate of the Heather Pavilion, a vital link between Vancouver’s past and present, hangs in the balance.