A small Gastown & Chinatown book club, matched by taste.

For readers, this is the best-stocked corner of the city. The stretch of West Pender known as Book Row holds The Paper Hound, selling new, used and rare books since 2013, and MacLeod's Books, a floor-to-ceiling maze of used and antiquarian stock. On East Georgia, Massy Books is Indigenous- and woman-owned, was BC's first registered living-wage bookstore, and hosts readings, workshops and film nights.

History is close at hand. The Chinese Canadian Museum opened in 2023 in the Wing Sang Building on East Pender, the oldest brick building in Chinatown, and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden sits beside a free public park with a pond and a small pagoda. Further east, the nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona library branch opened on East Hastings in 2017 as the first major civic building in Vancouver with an official Indigenous name.

Waterfront Station puts Gastown on the Expo and Canada Lines, the SeaBus and the West Coast Express, and Stadium–Chinatown station and the Main Street buses serve the rest of the area. For a morning coffee, Union Market on Union Street reopened in 2024 as a bakery and café with a heated patio, right on the Adanac bike route.