Don Butler - A Regular Palace: Celebrating 100 years of the Chateau Laurier

The Chteau Laurier has been the hub of the capital for 100 years, writes Maria Cook

The Chteau Laurier has moved with the times, even as it gives visitors a sense of Ottawas political and cultural history, writes Charlotte Gray

By Don Butler

By Maria Cook

By Don Butler

By Maria Cook

By Peter C. Newman

The Chteaus style is echoed in buildings throughout Ottawa's downtown, by Maria Cook

By Don Butler

From Nazi to nobility, the Chteau Laurier Hotel has hosted more than 15 million people since 1912. An eclectic list of patrons that might surprise you, assembled by Doug Fischer

It takes 400 people to keep the iconic Chteau Laurier humming and the 170,000 guests a year happy. Maria Cook meets some of them.

Compiled by Maria Cook

Compiled by Don Butler

The front view of the Chteau Laurier Hotel, taken under the atrium windows of Zos Lounge, named after the wife of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Photo: Chris Mikula / The Ottawa Citizen.

For 100 years, the world has walked through the lobby of the Fairmont Chteau Laurier, the grand hotel set in a picturesque landscape where the Rideau Canal locks make their descent to the Ottawa River.

From the moment it opened in 1912, it was in the words of an old brochure the place where politics and pleasure, finance and fashion meet... the hub of the capitals wheel of affairs, a great and worthy centre of Canadian life.

This was where the Canadian government set up temporary quarters when the Parliament buildings burned in 1916. It was the place troops massed before heading to war. Photographer Yousuf Karsh lived and worked at the hotel. The CBC broadcast from it. The long list of famous guests includes Queen Elizabeth, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.

The dramatic silhouette of towers and steep roofs of the Chteau Laurier defines Ottawa for visitors and residents alike. Conical turrets rise from massive walls of Indiana limestone. Gables of the warm-coloured stone are carved with flowers, scrolls and crests. Dormer windows punctuate expanses of green copper roof.

It has a striking presence, at once evocative of the romance of travel in the new world and of fairy tales from the old.

Yet, a century ago, its location in Majors Hill Park provoked heated debate over the use of public land for a private enterprise. Their echoes are heard in recent arguments over development in Lansdowne Park.

So bitter was the opposition that... the project came within an acre of being defeated, the Citizen wrote in 1929, when the Chteau was enlarged.

It was not only the location that was controversial. There were battles over design, a fired architect, and questionable backroom deals involving the prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier. To cap it off, weeks before the opening, there was a tragic loss on the Titanic.

The Chteau Laurier Hotel and Grand Trunk Railway Central Station under construction in 1911. The view looks east down Rideau Street. Photo: City of Ottawa Archives.

At the turn of the 19th century, a growing and prosperous Ottawa was overdue for a new hotel and a central train station.

For years, the capital has required the provision of such accommodation for the thousands of visitors who yearly visited Ottawa from all parts of Canada and the world, The Ottawa Citizen observed, adding that its lack has been a tremendous drawback to the tourist trade, which enriches the coffers of many cities.

The best hotel was the Russell Hotel, in what is now Confederation Square, but it was looking a bit tired with parts dating back to the 1870s, says David Jeanes, an Ottawa amateur historian and railway expert.

Meanwhile, mayor after mayor lamented the lack of a central train station and a common corridor to serve the independent railways that ran to privately built stations, none in the centre of the city.

Lumber baron J.R. Booth, owner of more railway track than any other person in North America (640 kilometres), had promised to erect a monumental downtown station in exchange for a city subsidy when he built his railway in the 1880s.

But Booth suffered huge losses in the Great Fire of 1900 and by 1902 he was short of cash. In 1904, he sold his line to the Grand Trunk Railway, which inherited the obligation to build a union station.

Enter Charles Melville Hays, the energetic American-born general manager of the Grand Trunk.

I have never been to Ottawa without thinking that the approach to the city should be an impressive one, one which would welcome people to our nations capital, Hays told city council.

Hays envisioned a railway that would span the country, as well as a chain of luxury hotels to compete with the Canadian Pacific Railway, which had built Quebec Citys Chteau Frontenac and the Banff Springs Hotel in the Rockies.

His flagship would be a magnificent hotel named the Chteau Laurier, an unusual honour for a sitting prime minister.

The hotel was to go on the south side of Rideau Street, (where the union station was eventually built), with the station on Besserer Street. Council refused this plan because it would have cut CPRs access to the Alexandra Bridge to Hull.

Other sites were considered and rejected and in 1907, Hays turned to Laurier for help.

Charles Melville Hays. The opening the Chteau Laurier Hotel in 1912 was delayed after Hays, general manager of the Grand Trunk Railway (owner of the hotel) went down with the Titanic. Photo: Canadian Railway Museum.

The Liberal prime minister took an active interest in the development of the capital. In 1893, he announced his intention to beautify Ottawa as a Washington of the North, and in 1899, he created the Ottawa Improvement Commission, the precursor to the National Capital Commission, which created parks and scenic parkways.

He also cared about sightlines to Parliament Hill. When an early design showed a 10-storey hotel on the south side of Rideau Street, Laurier went ballistic, says Jeanes. He was very sensitive about the position of Parliament Hill as dominating the skyline in Ottawa.

Laurier offered the Grand Trunk a site for free on Nepean Point, but Hays thought it too far from the business centre. He had his eye on Majors Hill Park.