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“Religiously,” Ken Hampton goes to his local pub every Thursday for fish and chips.

Or he used to, until this week. His beloved Dover Arms held “a wake” Sunday and pulled its last pint, after 40 years of serving the West End.

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The Dover Arms will always have a place in Vancouver history as the city’s “first neighbourhood pub following legislation in 1972 that ended the hotel-industry monopoly over the sale of draft beer,” according to The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver.

But now the Arms is the latest Vancouver institution to shut down, succumbing to a system where tenants are stuck with soaring property-tax bills while landowners watch their assets increase in value.

“It got to the point where we couldn’t afford to be there any more,” said Bill Kerasiotis, 42, whose family has run the Dover Arms since his father John opened it. “It’s a hard pill to swallow.”

Pub regulars assumed “The Arms” was joining a growing number of vacant storefronts on Denman Street because the business owners faced a steep rent hike, but that’s not exactly the case. Rent wasn’t cheap, but had been stable for a few years, Kerasiotis said, Arms management had a good relationship with the landlord and sales were steady. The increased pressures, though, came from ever-rising property taxes.