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Top Attractions in Chinatown

Carnegie Community Centre

Carnegie Community Centre is located at 401 Main Street at the corner of Hastings Street, in the old Carnegie Public Library building in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1901 Vancouver requested $50,000 from industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie for the purpose of building a library. Carnegie agreed, provided the City of Vancouver supplied the site and contributed $5000 a year. The original public library was completed in 1903. For decades, the top floor was the home of the Vancouver Museum. The Vancouver Public Library moved into a more spacious building at 750 Burrard Street in 1957 and the Carnegie building eventually fell into disrepair. Neighbourhood poverty activists from the Downtown Eastside Residents' Association convinced city council to turn it into a public space for local residents, and it opened as the Carnegie Community Centre in the 1980s. It now houses recreation facilities, a low-cost cafeteria, a branch of the Vancouver Public Library, and a variety of services and programs for the neighbourhood, which is one of the poorest in Canada. The Carnegie Centre is a drug and alcohol-free area. The Carnegie Community Centre is owned by the City of Vancouver and is funded by the Social Planning Department. It is open 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days per week and every day of the year. The centre is run by the board of directors of the Carnegie Community Centre Association, which is elected annually from the members of the association. Membership costs one dollar per year and is available to neighbourhood residents, and all the centre's programs are free to members. There is also an Adult Learning Centre on the top floor, which provides an informal one-on-one tutoring. There is a computer lab containing multiple computers for educational use located inside the Carnegie Hall as well. The Carnegie Centre puts out a bi-monthly newsletter with articles concerning the Downtown Eastside Community. The Institute for stained glass in Canada has documented the stained glass at Carnegie Community Centre. The Carnegie Centre supports and provides a home for a number of projects, including the political group known as CCAP (Carnegie Community Action Project), which has recently been associated with the anti-gentrification protests in the DTES.

Sam Kee Building

The Sam Kee Building, located at 8 West Pender Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is noteworthy for being the "shallowest commercial building in the world", according to the Guinness Book of Records. The Sam Kee Company—one of the wealthiest firms in Chinatown—purchased a standard-sized lot in 1903. In 1912, however, Vancouver widened Pender Street and expropriated 24 feet of the above-ground portion of the property—effectively (or so it was first believed) making conventional commercial use of the remaining frontage impractical, if not impossible. Refusing the neighbors offer to buy the remaining land, Sam Kee decided to build anyway. In 1913, the architects Brown and Gillam designed this narrow, steel-framed building's ground-floor depth (from storefront to rear of building) to measure 4'11" (1.50 m), with a second-floor depth (from overhanging bay window to rear) of 6' (1.83 m). The basement extends beneath the sidewalk and originally housed public baths, while the ground floor was used for offices and shops and the top story for living quarters. Historical renovation of the building was designed by Soren Rasmussen, and was completed in 1986. It is a tourist attraction and an insurance office. The building is considered the shallowest commercial building in the world by the Guinness Book of Records and was formerly also viewed as such by Ripley's Believe it or Not!, but in recent years this status has been challenged by the "Skinny Building" in Pittsburgh. The dispute centres around the fact that while the Sam Kee Building's width varies from floor to floor, Pittsburgh's "Skinny Building" is 5'2" (1.57 m) wide on all floors.

Insite

Insite is the first legal supervised drug injection site in North America, located at 139 East Hastings Street, in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia. The DTES had 4700 chronic drug users in 2000 and has been considered to be the centre of an "injection drug epidemic". The site provides a safe and health-focused location for injection drug use, primarily heroin. The clinic does not supply any drugs. Medical staff are present to provide addiction treatment, mental health assistance, and first aid in the event of an overdose or wound. In 2009, the site recorded 276,178 visits (an average of 702 visits per day) by 5,447 unique users; 484 overdoses occurred with no fatalities, due to intervention by medical staff. Health Canada has provided $500,000 per year to operate the site, and the BC Ministry of Health contributed $1,200,000 to renovate the site and cover operating costs. Insite also serves as a resource for those seeking to use a harm reduction approach for people who inject drugs around the world. In recent years, delegations from a number of countries are on record touring the facility, including Colombia and Brazil.
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