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Vancouver Skate Plaza

Skateparks in CanadaSports venues in Vancouver

The Vancouver Skate Plaza is a skatepark in Vancouver, British Columbia. It is located under the Georgia Street and Dunsmuir viaducts at the corner of Union St. and Quebec St. It was designed and built in 2004, making it the first Street plaza skatepark. The design mimics urban plazas popular in the downtown cores of many large cities, including handrails, ledges, and stairs. It is free to use and covers 26,000 square feet. Vancouver Skate Plaza was named as number 21 on a top-25 list of best skate parks in the world by Complex magazine in August 2013.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Vancouver Skate Plaza (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Vancouver Skate Plaza
Expo Boulevard, Vancouver

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N 49.277285 ° E -123.102535 °
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Vancouver Skate Plaza (Downtown Skateboard Plaza)

Expo Boulevard
V6A Vancouver
British Columbia, Canada
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Sam Kee Building
Sam Kee Building

The Sam Kee Building, located at 8 West Pender Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is the "narrowest commercial building in the world" according to the Guinness Book of Records. The Sam Kee Company - originally owned by one of the wealthiest businessmen in Vancouver Chinatown, Mr. Chang Toy (also known as Sam Kee) - purchased the standard-sized lot in 1903. In 1912, however, Vancouver widened Pender Street and expropriated 24 feet (7.3 m) 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. After Chang Toy refused the neighbour's offer to buy the remaining land, someone bet him that he couldn’t use the land for anything. In 1913, the architects Brown and Gillam designed this narrow, steel-framed building. Its ground-floor depth (from storefront to rear of building) measures 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 narrowest commercial building in the world according to 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, and is 6 feet wide in places, Pittsburgh's "Skinny Building" is 5'2" (1.57 m) wide on all floors.

Insite

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