The Alberta Hotel, which was the height of modern when it opened on the northeast corner of Jasper Avenue and 98th Street in 1904, could easily have disappeared forever in 1977 when its then owner applied to the City to demolish it. The application aroused a storm of controversy. Shabby and down-at-the-heels as it had become, the Alberta Hotel was recognized by Edmontonians as part of their cultural heritage; they urged the City to find ways to save it. Ideas were bandied about on the editorial pages of local newspapers for a few years while the hotel continued its slide into decrepitude. Finally, in 1983, the City made a giant leap of faith when it hired Woolfenden Group Architects to dismantle the Alberta Hotel and to store its valuable parts for some undetermined future reconstruction. Who could have imagined that more than a quarter century would elapse between the 1983-84 dismantling and its ultimate reconstruction by local architect/developer Gene Dub?
Reconstructed and looking very much as it did when it opened in 1904, the Alberta Hotel has returned to its old spot on Jasper Avenue, shifted just 15 feet to one side of its original footprint, says Architect Dub. Local radio station CKUA, another bastion of Edmonton’s rich cultural heritage, has purchased it and will move in just as soon as the interiors are ready. And when that happens, Dub plans to lease the main floor bar which he will restore to its original glory — to be operated as a local bar and eatery.
As a volunteer at the City of Edmonton Archives, I recently found myself working on a collection which was donated to the archives in 1999 but which needed to be catalogued. The collection related to the dismantling process and it included, in addition to more than 500 photographs, a number of documents relating to the delicate dismantling project. The donor, William Hamilton Architect Ltd., was the successor firm to Woolfenden Group Architects and inherited the Alberta Hotel demolition documentation. Luckily, individuals within the William Hamilton firm recognized the importance of the documents and photos to Edmonton’s history and decided to place them where they can be accessible to all citizens.
The donation from William Hamilton Architect, known as the William Hamilton fonds, can be found in the archives using two numbers. MS-740 contains all the paper documentation while the photographs are all catalogued under the number EA-788.
For the benefit of researchers, the City of Edmonton Archives has now produced an Alberta Hotel “finding aid” — that is, a document which describes all the material in the archives related to the Alberta Hotel. This aid contains a brief history of the hotel and a short account of its design and the materials used in the original construction. It also lists and describes the various collections in the archives which relate to the Alberta Hotel.
There are many photographs of the Alberta Hotel in the collection of the City of Edmonton Archives. Photo EB-26-343, for instance, was originally published in a special edition of the Edmonton Bulletin which was published in 1911. The article described the hotel as “[o]ne of the first established public houses” in the city and one which “has always retained its leading position”. The hotel’s distinctive conical turret or cupola is rather faded in this photograph, but it was (and is) one of the building’s most distinctive architectural features.
To find out more about the Alberta Hotel, check out the City of Edmonton Archives.
