Kevin Spenst's new book takes readers inside the West End's Stanley Park Manor

Lyn Guy has managed Stanley Park Manor on Haro Street for 25 years, and she remembers its tenants by name and by former unit number. Her memory is one of the book's main sources: Kevin Spenst's "Stanley Park Manor: A Collective History", out November 18, draws on her, on former tenants, and on email exchanges, archival photos, old advertisements and newspaper clippings.

The building was completed in 1929 with 122 apartments, at a cost of about $200,000, by developer West Coast Builders. In 1950, when a fire broke out after the tip of a conveyor carrying wood to the furnace caught fire, the building had 139 suites and about 200 tenants, and most stayed put. In 1974 the body of Margarite Ann Cuff, 32, was found naked in her apartment there. The murder was never solved.

The building has housed musicians, singers, actors and journalists. Simma Holt, the Vancouver journalist and feminist who was the first Jewish woman elected to the House of Commons, lived there in the 1940s. In 2014 award-winning actor Grace Dove sublet a unit. Guy recalls in an email included in the book: "I recall her stopping by the office to tell me she was going off to South America to shoot winter scenes for The Revenant." The publisher's page also names Pierre Berton and Trish Klein of the Be Good Tanyas as former tenants.

Spenst, a local author who had published four poetry collections before this one, moved into the building in late 2020. Guy showed him two available units; he saw one and fell in love with it. "I have never lived in a place where there is so much goodwill," he said in a phone interview, describing neighbours who chat in the laundry room, the lobby, the front entranceway and the recycling area in the back alley.

The book is published by Anvil Press and costs $26.00 in Canada. A Roedde House Museum book talk is listed for November 19, 2026.