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When the wrecking ball smashes into the decrepit 76-unit building at 590 Alexander Street, it will also take down a piece of the Downtown Eastside's past. According to popular folklore, an early Vancouver madam by the name of Marie Gomez once owned a place on this site where weary loggers and travellers sought warm comfort from the women she kept.

In 1983, a new 76-unit apartment building bearing the name Marie Gomez Place opened its doors to low-income seniors and singles. "She gave it up to the city so they could build social housing," Kim Kerr, executive director of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, which started operating the building in 1989, told the Georgia Straight. "That's what I've always heard. I don't know how much fact is in that or if it's just a myth."

In recent times, Marie Gomez Place became notorious as one of the worst places in Vancouver. Last year, a local newspaper ran a story quoting a police officer who described the building as a "house of horrors", where crack-addicted prostitutes were tortured and their heads shaved with razors by drug dealers collecting debts.

But it was a home for residents like Barry Thurlow, a 66-year-old widower who lost his wife and two children to a car crash many years ago. From his apartment, the former army cook could watch people coming up and down Princess Street from its intersection with Powell Street, at the edge of Oppenheimer Park.

Thurlow will be relocated to a new place on the west side of the city. He told the Straight that shopping in the Downtown Eastside is one of the things he will miss. He added: "There's a lot of good people here, but there's also a lot of bad guys as well."

Nathasha Weisgerber worked the streets and was sleeping in doorways and underneath stairs before she got a room at Marie Gomez Place. Like Thurlow, she doesn't really mind moving out, and she noted that the building "isn't as bad as they make it".

"I'll miss the people," Weisgerber told the Straight. "People who live here are more like a family."

Each unit at Marie Gomez Place has its own small kitchen and bathroom, features that aren't present in downtown single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels. "You don't know how necessary these things are until you don't have them," Richard Colburn, a 55-year-old resident, told the Straight.

Kerr said that like a number of wood-frame buildings dating from the 1980s, it was a leaky structure and its water pipes dripped, and the federal government wouldn't provide funds to repair it. Because of the condition of the building, in 2002 DERA moved out the tenants, who were mostly on welfare.

In 2003, DERA decided to reopen it for hard-to-house homeless people dealing with conditions ranging from substance abuse to HIV/AIDS. In 2006, the management and administration of the building were transferred to BC Housing. This year, DERA signed a memorandum of understanding with the City of Vancouver and BC Housing that provided for the demolition of Marie Gomez Place.

"I know that we're doing the right thing, but it's certainly something that we took a long time doing because of the significance of losing the housing," Kerr said. "There's no hiding the fact that the units are full of some of the hardest-to-house people in Vancouver. It's had its ups and downs, but the bottom line is we kept a roof over people's heads since then. To continue to do it now would be to disregard the safety of the tenants over political positions."

Last month in a report to city council, Cameron Gray, director of the city's housing centre, wrote that it "is with great regret that the demolition of 76 units of housing for low income singles is recommended". The units represent 1.76 percent of the nonmarket housing serving singles in the Downtown Eastside.

"We have to find another 76 units at some point in the neighbourhood if that site is not redeveloped for social housing," Gray told the Straight. "Unfortunately, that's the reality of leaky-envelope failures."

Staff are reviewing the zoning of the Oppenheimer district as part of an overall review of zoning for the Downtown Eastside. In 2005, there were about 13,000 residential units in the Downtown Eastside, according to a city report. These were broken down into roughly 5,000 SROs, 5,000 social-housing units, 900 special-needs residential-facility beds, and 2,100 market condos, rental apartments, live-work units, and houses.

"Twenty-five years ago there was almost no condominium development within 15 blocks of Oppenheimer Park, in the heart of the Downtown Eastside, and the area was surrounded by industry and service-commercial business," the city report stated. "Today there are condominium projects within 2 blocks of Oppenheimer Park, and there are hundreds of condominium units currently under construction or in the development process in the Downtown Eastside."

Will another Marie Gomez Place rise on the city-owned site at 590 Alexander Street? That will depend on which group builds a structure on the site, according to Kerr.

At the very least, the social-housing activist says, there should be a plaque in honour of Gomez.