Peter Trower
Former location, Alcazar Hotel, Dunsmuir & Homer St.
"Wind whitecapping the inlet
rain like whipping string
Sea Bus bucking and dipping-
behind us - the Alcazar - dead as a doornail
Landmark of brick and lumber
soon to be sundered and tumbled
in a rattle of empty room
all of the ghosts going down in a heap"
From Alcazar Requiem
Peter Trower, one of B.C.’s finest poets, drank here often in the 1960s with poets Milton Acorn and John Newlove when the Alcazar Hotel was a favoured hangout of writers and students from the nearby Vancouver School of Art. Trower lived in the Alcazar on numerous occasions during the period when he was a logger. The Alcazar opened in 1913 and was demolished seventy years later. Peter Trower received the eighth George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in British Columbia in 2002. In December of 2015, the town of Gibsons decided to name a street after him. Peter Trower wrote Alcazar Requiem in 1983.
