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From the roof of his unique new art museum in Chinatown, Bob Rennie can see the Downtown Eastside hotels where his truck-driver father used to deliver beer.

In a rooming-house courtyard next door, laundry hangs on the line and vegetables sit drying on windowsills.

"I guess one of the reasons I came here is that I feel comfortable here," Mr. Rennie said at the gallery a few days before today's official opening of his museum, an event promising to draw an estimated 800 people, including curators, art dealers and artists from all over North America and Europe.

The boyish-looking condo marketer, who favours runners, retro cardigans, Elvis Costello glasses and Bentleys, is often seen as the person who almost single-handedly created Vancouver's downtown of expensive condo towers.

But he grew up on Vancouver's working-class east side, where his mother was a waitress at the Eldorado Motor Hotel on Kingsway, and he dropped out of Vancouver Technical Secondary School in Grade 12. When he bought his first piece of art that same year with the savings from his busboy job at The Old Spaghetti Factory, a print of Norman Rockwell's On Top of the World, his family had to scrounge money from neighbours to have it shipped from San Francisco.

Now, a long way from that first purchase, Mr. Rennie is bringing his vastly expanded contemporary-art collection - thousands of pieces that experts say form one of the best private contemporary-art holdings in the world - to the east side, a place where he says his kind of art belongs.

"The Downtown Eastside is marginalized, and a lot of what I have is about marginalization, oppression and resistance," Mr. Rennie said as he walked through construction chaos a few days before opening. Some workers were installing the complex pieces created by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, while others were putting in more pedestrian items like air vents and doorknobs.

Since Mr. Rennie's first acquisition, he has bought the work of about 170 artists, including people like Brian Jungen, the B.C. native artist who creates works out of Nike running shoes or plastic cafeteria trays, and Vancouver photographer Ian Wallace. The artists whose work he tends to buy extensively often make references to the past or to identities that have been appropriated by others over time.

One, Kerry James Marshall, an artist who grew up in south central Los Angeles, plays with popular-culture images and history to portray modern African-American life. Another, Anselm Kiefer, creates what one art critic called "imposing, operatic works dealing with the historical, mythological and literary themes that animate post-war German culture."

In a move that meshes perfectly with Mr. Rennie's interest in history and appropriation, the site of his museum is the 120-year-old Wing Sang building, where generations of early Chinese pioneers lived and operated their businesses. Now, Mr. Rennie sees the building, in its new incarnation, and his art collection, as complementing each other.

"It's balanced, the history and the building are outside and the art and museum are inside."

The restored building, which will also house his real-estate operations, still has an original classroom the children of those pioneers used, and the narrow laneway gap between the two parts of the building that alludes to the secret passageways Vancouver's Chinese used during curfews.

Mr. Rennie admits that some people in the business world don't understand what he is doing. He has sunk somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20-million into renovating the Wing Sang building - the kind of investment he would probably never advise anyone to make. And he has sunk even more millions into acquiring his collection, which until now, he and his partner, Carey Fouks, have been storing in a South Granville warehouse except for the fraction they could display in their gallery-like apartment.

Oddest of all to those who have watched him achieve fame and fortune by mastering the art of catering to what the public wants, the art he collects - often complex, abstract pieces that require education and theory to understand - has nothing to do with popular taste. His most recent purchase is a group of pieces by British artist Mike Nelson, who sawed out parts of the wall at the Hayward Gallery in London and positioned the box-like pieces on the floor.

Mr. Rennie also has no intention of selling his collection. "I'm just the custodian for this work, and I think it helps me buy, because artists want to know their work is in safe hands."

Reed Shier, the curator of North Vancouver's Presentation House Gallery, which has shown some of Mr. Rennie's collection in the past, has observed that he is not a player in the art market.

"It's not speculation. A lot of people in the art market in the last decade were doing that, but he wasn't."

Mr. Rennie is also putting his collection in a museum that he has avoided publicizing through conventional news releases. (Given his excellent connections with every reporter and power broker in town, however, the opening has turned into one of the major events of the year.)

He will open the museum to the public - once a week by appointment is the plan for the moment - but won't charge admission. And he said the profits from his next five to 10 years of real-estate work will go to establishing a foundation to maintain the museum. He estimates it will take about 15 years to show everything he has collected, one exhibit at a time.

Why do all this, the antithesis of everything that has made him successful as a condo salesman?

"I wanted to be remembered in this city for something besides selling condos," Mr. Rennie said. "This is my legacy: art and the museum."

He's known already known by one group for something besides selling condos. The city's art experts say that his new museum is generating excitement throughout the art world because it will give people a unique opportunity to view artists' work over decades.

"We know that Bob has assembled a collection of international significance, and now he's about to share that with everybody," said Christina Ritchie, director of the Contemporary Art Gallery. "We're going to get a chance to really know the artists because of the way that he collects."

Mr. Rennie is renowned for collecting from works from throughout artists' careers.

Ron Burnett, president of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, said it will be a unique addition to the art scene in Canada.

"It's one of the finest private collections in the country. It's an extremely valuable asset for the city of Vancouver and the people of Canada generally," he said.

In spite of that kind of assessment, Mr. Rennie is nervous about the launch of his new identity. "If I get to prove anything with this, it's that it's okay to be vulnerable," he said. But as he frets aloud, he reminds himself jokingly from time to time that "everything is going to be alright" - the same words that shine out in white neon from the rooftop of his building.

A work by London artist Martin Creed, the sentence is hard to spot at first. It's visible only to people who walk through certain parts of this east side neighbourhood - and, even then, it's spotted by only those who are the most careful observers in this much mythologized, marginalized, historic part of the city.

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A go-to guy

Bob Rennie often doesn't look or act like one of the city's most influential people.

Oh, he can wear a suit and talk business when he has to. But more often, he plays the role of best and funniest friend, even in his business world.

He asks about your kids and tracks their progress through life. He tells stories of himself being nasty or emotional or outrageous. He shares pieces of his personal life that spouses might not even reveal to each other. All the antithesis of the alpha-male chest-thumping jocularity that is more often the norm in the upper echelons of power.

But he is at the centre of everything significant happening in the city. Although his official job description is condo marketer, he has become part of the design team in any development in which he is involved, helping decide on the look, layout and even environmental features. He's also the broker when projects run into trouble.

Mr. Rennie is generally believed to have an unerring sense for who has power and who doesn't. (And, as some of his critics said, a mastery of "shameless self-promotion.") He has been portrayed as having a 17th-century courtier's instinct for how to be in the middle of important negotiations and to get powerful people around him to rely on him as a broker and problem-solver.

He's said in the past that this skill probably comes from formative experiences in his teens. One was being the mediator between his warring parents, who were perpetually broke and on the verge of divorcing. The other was working in the service industry, like his job at The Old Spaghetti Factory, where he says he learned everything he needed to know about keeping people happy.

After dropping out of school three months short of graduation in 1974 - the only classes he was going to were the art classes - he started selling real estate. By his mid-20s, thanks to his willingness to hustle until midnight and beyond, he became wealthy selling single-family houses in Burnaby. In 1994, he teamed up with a UBC business professor to start selling something relatively new to Vancouver: condos.

Mr. Rennie perfected the art of selling them as a lifestyle product, complete with trendy touches: co-op cars available for buyers in one building, live/work spaces in another. His most famous slogan, one that came to epitomize the new Vancouver: Live where you work. Work where you live.

Special to The Globe and Mail