Work on a major mural to honour two well-known community members is now underway at the former Balmoral Hotel site in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Lead artists Kyle Shipman and Jesse Gouchey launched the large-scale legacy project last week on the wall at 159 East Hastings Street.
“This is our way of finally getting to mourn the loss of our friends and get a little bit of closure,” Shipman said in an interview.
Before he died in April 2025, it was Trey Helten’s dream to transform the wall on the Balmoral site, which is awaiting redevelopment as social housing, into a community mural.
The former Overdose Prevention Society (OPS) manager and Downtown Eastside advocate had planned to paint the late Angel Gates, a prominent community member and longtime resident of the Balmoral Hotel, which was ordered closed by the city of Vancouver in July 2017 due to fire and safety concerns.
The city took ownership of the Balmoral Hotel through an expropriation settlement in 2020, and had plans to upgrade the notorious SRO.
However, due to “decades of underinvestment and mismanagement by the building’s former owners”, the city said the building was no longer safe and a demolition order was issued in February 2022.
The new design for the mural Helten envisioned instead depicts Helten painting Gates, in a tribute to them both.
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“The gift of Trey just keeps giving and it’s just so meaningful to me to give back and to have a part of this,” Gouchey told Global News.
Legendary street artist Jamie Hardy, a.k.a. Smokey D, will be painting the bottom of the mural, which is expected to become one of the largest artworks in the city.
“I knew them both (Helten and Gates) very well so it’s pretty heavy,” Smokey D said in an interview. “It’s really big for the whole community, right? You know what I mean, everyone loved them.”
OPS executive director Sarah Blyth said she and Helten started work on the mural project a few years ago, and as soon as the Balmoral demolition was finished in 2024, they started contacting the city and other stakeholders about using the site.
At one point she said, Helten wanted to jump the fence and just start painting.
While the city of Vancouver is providing the site and the paint, the OPS scraped together donations for the community-driven mural – with a fundraiser underway to cover “unexpected expenses”.
“It takes a long time sometimes, bureaucracy, but we’ve been patiently going through the hoops,” Blyth told Global News. “Nothing that comes easy is ever as rewarding as if you have to work hard to make it happen.”
Blyth said her team was also recently approached by city engineering crews to potentially paint alleys in the area.
“In the night or early in the morning, city vehicles sometimes have a hard time seeing what’s in the alleys,” Blyth explained in an interview. “They’ve noticed that when the alleys are painted bright that they are able to see better what’s in the alleys.”
Approximately one dozen artists will contribute to the massive mural, which is expected to take a month to complete.
Since 2025, the Carnegie Community Centre has been managing the Balmoral Hotel site as a temporary community space, in a partnership with the city and BC Housing.
Provincial budget cuts have stalled the Balmoral redevelopment, which was anticipated to be funded through the Community Housing Fund (CHF).
The City of Vancouver said it remains a “priority project” and the province is in the process of identifying alternate funding sources.
Seriously Global this is not important news