Opening in 1906, Winnipeg’s Royal Alexandra Hotel was one of the first Canadian Pacific hotels to depart from the chateau style that characterized such hotels as the Frontenac and Banff Springs. As a result, although luxurious on the inside, it didn’t look much different from an ordinary office building on the outside, and in fact was somewhat darker than shown in the illustration on the cover of this menu. On the other hand, with just 90,000 residents in 1906, Winnipeg was not a huge metropolis like Montreal or Toronto, so the Royal Alex (as locals called it) was almost certainly the tallest building in the city at the time.
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Guests included such notables as King George VI in 1939 and Princess Elizabeth in 1951, returning as Queen Elizabeth II in 1959. A circa 1930 booklet about the hotel can be viewed or downloaded from the University of British Columbia’s Chung Collection.
Unlike most of Canadian Pacific’s other hotels, the Royal Alexandra did not survive the change in travel habits that came with the automobile. It didn’t help that, while located next door to the Canadian Pacific train station, it was in one the seedier parts of town where auto tourists were unlikely to venture, so it closed in 1967. When it was torn down in 1971, the interior of the elegant dining hall was preserved and eventually reassembled at the Cranbook History Centre in British Columbia.
This menu was not used in the hotel but aboard a Canadian Pacific dining car for members of the Supreme Council of the Royal Arcanum on their way home from a 1931 convention in Victoria. In addition to fruit, cereals, bread, and beverage, the unpriced menu offered a choice of cod, lamb chop, or ham or bacon and eggs.