The Chateau style of the Empress Hotel, featured in yesterday’s booklet, as well as the Chateau Frontenac, has always been a favorite. This contrasts sharply to the more blocky style of Winnipeg’s Royal Alexandra Hotel even though the Alexandra was built two years earlier than the Empress. The hotel cost $1 million to construct (about $30 million in today’s U.S. dollars) and was billed as Canadian Pacific’s most luxurious up to that time.

Click image to view and download a 36.2-MB PDF of this 12-page booklet from the Chung collection.

Yet the design was, frankly, boring. Did Canadian Pacific choose a boring design because it thought Winnipeg was boring? Did it think that a more cubical building would attract people by being more modern? If so, it failed as the exterior appearance of the building was quickly dated, which perhaps contributed to the fact that it closed in 1967 and has since been demolished. Other than Place Viger, Canadian Pacific’s other hotels illustrated on the back cover of this booklet have all survived or, in the case of the Hotel Vancouver, were replaced by an even grander Chateau-style hotel.

This booklet is only 12 pages long compared to the 16 pages of the Empress and Lake Louise expression booklets. The difference is that the latter two booklets included a page of tissue paper separating the covers from the interior pages. The part of this tissue page just before the back cover advertised the forthcoming Empress of Britain, which was expected to hit the waves in 1931.

For some reason, this page was left out of the Alexandra booklet, or at least this copy of that booklet. The booklet, like the Empress booklet, says that the York Hotel opened in June 1929, suggesting the booklet was published after that. It gives no other indications of age, and though I’m dating it to 1929, it could just as easily be from 1930.