Photographs by the author. You may reproduce them without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photogrpaher and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. Click on the images to enlarge them.]
The Empress Hotel, Victoria, British Columbia, designed by Francis Mawson Rattenbury (1867–1935). This grand chateau-like hotel, the culmination of the building boom of the 1890s, was built for the Canadian Pacific Steamship Line in 1904-08, with later additions. It opened to the public on 20 January 1908. Rattenbury, who had previously won the competition to design new legislative buildings for the British Columbia provincial government (1891), utilized a seven-storey design similar to that of the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City: a French Renaissance style with elements of Neo Gothic, Chinese, and even Tudor. It served as the terminus hotel for the steamship company, which would market the grand hostelry as a tourist destination throughout the 1920s.
As Harry Gregson explains, for a town of 20,000 people or so, it was a massive engineering project:
Like everything undertaken by the Canadian Pacific Railway Co., the Empress Hotel was conceived on a grand scale with a view to permanence. The magic transformation of the waterfront caused by the construction of the hotel is inconceivable to Victorians of today [1970]. The site now graced by the hotel and its extensive gardens was an odoriferous slough and garbage dump for the city. The slough was filled with silt dredged from the harbour to create footage on Government, Humboldt and Bellevue streets. The James Bay wooden bridge was removed and the Causeway built. [Gregson 177]
The gateway on the south-west corner of the property.
Construction of such a huge stone structure on a stinking tidal foreshore (over which the 800-foot wooden James Bay Bridge had run from 1859) was challenging, and cost $1,600,00. It was chiefly instigated by businessmen-politicians David Russell Ker, inheritor of his Scots father’s milling business, and Harry G. Barnard, who inherited Barnard’s Express — which was vastly successful as a result of the Cariboo Gold Rush. Barnard, subsequently to become a Canadian Senator, was Victoria’s mayor at the time, one of the largest property owners in Victoria. The land necessary for the Empress was drained and guarded from the waters of the Inner Harbour by a stone Causeway. The north and south wings, added in 1911 and 1928, brought the entire cost of the Empress to $13,000,000.
With the opening of this grand hotel, the CPR initiated a triangular service between Vancouver, Victoria, and Seattle to boost tourism in 1928. During the Great Depression, the hotel typically had more staff than guests. However, it recovered. Over the years, distinguished guests have included Edward, Prince of Wales, Shirley Temple, King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Rattenbury also designed the Canadian Pacific Steamship Pavilion (across Belleville Street), the Crystal Gardens behind the Empress on Douglas Street, the renovated Courthouse on Bastion Square, and the Bank of Montreal at the Government Street entrance to Bastion Square.
Bibliography
Barrett, Anthony A., and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe. Francis Mawson Rattenbury and British Columbia: Architecture and Challenge in the Imperial Age. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983.
Elliot, David R. Rattenbury, Francis Mawson. " Canadian Encyclopedia. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988. Vol. 3: 1828-1829.
Gregson, Harry. A History of Victoria 1842-1970. North Vancouver: J. J. Douglas, 1977.
"Rattenbury, Francis Mawson." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Posted 20 May 2008. Web. Accessed 25 April 2023
Created 20 April 2023