This 1931 apartment was the second building on the site. It was designed by Ross Lort, and 
was called the Park Lane Apartments, and it was yet another of Hugh A Warner’s developments, seen here in a VPL image in the year it was completed. In 1905 the site was the home of G W Hobson, and a picture of his house was in the Vancouver Province that year. It was built around 1902 as 2001 Nelson Street, and Christopher Hobson was the first resident. We looked at Mr Warner’s history in a post on one of his other West End investments, the Plaza Apartments.
As with many of the West End apartments, (other than the usual leasing advertisements), the Park Lane was mentioned for a few weddings and new tenants moving in. Other references are few, and far apart – as in 1933 when Miss A M Day found her unit had been broken into and her purse, with $5 in it, stolen. There seem to have been a significant number of deaths of tenants reported, perhaps indicating the age of many of the people who chose to call it home. In 1939 John McGibbon, former assistant commissioner of the RCMP died here. In 1941 it was George Dudley Eaton, a Maine lumberman who had retired aged 37, due to ill health, in 1910 and moved to Vancouver. In 1943 Michael Arhus passed away in hospital, aged 43.
It was reported that D J McLachlan had a lucky escape in 1939 when he hit another automobile while driving in Surrey. The car careened across the road, struck another vehicle, and rolled into the ditch. Mary McLachlan was 68 when her death was reported here in 1941. She must have been the driver of the car, as her husband, a hardware merchant, had died in 1931. She was a retired social worker, and “a worker in both the Local and Provincial Council of Women, of which she was past president. She was active in the John Howard Society, and, at the time of her death, was its first vice president. She was also a former officer and life member of the Women’s Canadian Club, a director of the Alexandra Orphanage, and a charter member of the Point Grey Golf Club.”
Dr. McNichol, who lived here, was fortunately only injured when the car he was driving hit another vehicle at Alberni and Gilford in May 1945.
Some of the units here are described as ‘huge’, and in 2007 a 3-bed apartment leased at $2,695 a month; in 1986 it had been $950. Today the apartments, as with all the heritage buildings in the West End, become available very rarely and are leased very quickly.
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Changing Vancouver 