The New Jasper Park Lodge in 1954

We’ve previously seen Canadian National’s booklet on Jasper from 1953 and 1955. Here’s one for the year between, 1954. It has a lot more color photos than the 1953 edition, but perhaps not quite as many as 1955.

Click image to download a 25.2-MB PDF of this 44-page booklet plus fold-out map.

Jasper Park Lodge — meaning the restaurant, lounge, ballroom, lobby, arrival desk, and offices — suffered a major fire in 1952. Its replacement was not completed until after the 1953 booklet was published, so the 1954 booklet is the first to present photos of the all-new central lodge.

The old building was built in what Americans would call National Park Rustic style, with a log exterior and gables for rooms on the top story. The new building is more of a ranch style, with a long low roof, looking like a much larger version of the ranch houses that many of its 1950s customers might have aspired to live in. The interiors also look much brighter with ’50s-era decorations lit by large banks of windows facing Lac Beauvert.

A copy of this booklet is available on archive.org, but its cover was partly faded. This is from my own collection, but it has some color problems as well. Whoever printed this for CN apparently did not use fade-proof inks.


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