Hotel Fort Garry
222 Broadway,
Winnipeg

Designation Date: March 30, 1990
Designation Authority: Honourable Bonnie Mitchelson, Minister of Culture, Heritage and Recreation
Present Owner: 3031632 Manitoba Inc.

Canada's major railway companies not only produced stations of exceptional quality, they also created several memorable hotels that typically adjoined their rail terminus. In Winnipeg, the first such endeavour, the Manitoba Hotel, was carried out by the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP). The Canadian Pacific Railway erected its showpiece hotel, the Royal Alexandra, in 1904–06. And the GTP was back at it again after the destruction by fire of the Manitoba Hotel. Their new edifice, the Hotel Fort Garry, was built in 1912–13.

Where the Royal Alexandra was an ambitious expression of the popular (and fairly common) Classical Revival style, the architects of the Fort Garry took a very different approach. Architects Ross and Macdonald (of Montreal) looked to the Château style for their building. Inspired by the designs of medieval French châteaus, with their dramatic mansard roofs and dormers, fanciful stonework and turrets and finials, the Château style was considered by many to embody distinctly Canadian values and attitudes. At the Hotel Fort Garry, the result is a phenomenal building, of great quality, constructed with the most expensive of materials and with interior spaces of the most sumptuous character.

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