Sam Kee Building

The Sam Kee Building is located at 8 West Pender Street in Vancouver, British Columbia and is noteworthy for being the narrowest commercial building in the world.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Sam Kee Company was one of the wealthiest firms in Chinatown. It bought this land as a standard-sized lot in 1903, but the City widened Pender Street in 1912 and expropriated 24 feet (7.3 m) of the lot.

In 1913 the architects Brown and Gillam designed this narrow, steel-framed building, only 4'11" (1.5 m) at its ground-floor base and 6 feet (183 cm) at the second-story bay windows. The basement extends under the sidewalk and originally housed public baths, while the ground floor was used for offices and shops and the top story for living quarters. [Mellon, Steve. (May 30, 2004) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette " [http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=PG&p_theme=pg&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=102F18D1667A90CA&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D Here in Downtown.] " Section: Lifestyle; Page F9.]

Rehabilitation of the building for Jack Chow was designed by Soren Rasmussen Architect and completed in 1986. [ [http://www.vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/heritage/walks/w_ch1.htm City of Vancouver website - Heritage Walks] ]

The building is considered the thinnest commercial building in the world by the Guinness Book of Records and Ripley's Believe it or Not!, but in recent years, this status has been challenged by the Skinny Building in Pittsburgh, which measures only 5'2" (157 cm) in width. [ [http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04151/322795.stm Article on the Skinny Building in the Post-Gazette website, 30 May 2004.] ] [O'Driscoll, Bill (August 29, 2007) Pittsburgh City Paper " [http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A34939 A unique Downtown art project holds its final show.] " Volume 17; Issue 35; Page 40.]

The dispute centres around the fact that at 4'11", The Sam Kee Building is still the world's narrowest commercial building at the base, but Pittsburgh's Skinny Building maintains the same 5'2" measurement on the second and third floors, where as Sam Kee building is 6' wide on the second floor. Nonetheless, the stainless-steel 1935 building built by William G. Singer at 15th Street at South Penn Square in Philadelphia measures 4-by-75-foot, with walls one-sixteenth of an inch thick. [Philadelphia Inquirer (August 28, 1986) " [http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=PI&s_site=philly&p_multi=PI&p_theme=realcities&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB29B709347EC57&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D William G. Singer Entrepreneur.] " Section: Local, page B16.]

ee also

* Spite house
* Skinny House

References