The Empress Hotel

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Victoria’s Empress Hotel was built in the grand tradition by the
Canadian Pacific Railway in 1908. Then as now, it attracted wealthy
world travelers by its architecture, its atmosphere, its service, and
its comforts.

Terry Reksten’s celebration of this venerable dowager is generously
illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white and 30 color historic and
modern photographs. There are also photos of drawings and mementos
gathered from both public and private collections. The British-born
author grew up in Vancouver and has long been a resident and a recorder
of Victoria.

The text is in three parts: The City and the CPR; The Empress of
Victoria; and The Grand Old Lady of Government Street. The history of
Victoria begins with a quick sketch of the city’s development by the
late 19th century as “an outpost of empire.” After December 1901,
Victoria’s Board of Trade schemed and worked to attract a CPR tourist
hotel to the city.

Reksten tells the tale with dry humor and intriguing detail. Francis
Rattenbury, who had already designed the new Parliament Buildings, was
chosen as the architect for the Empress Hotel, which opened in 1908 and
soon became the centre of social life in Victoria.

The photographs catch the elegance and the many moods of the hotel,
which Bruce Hutchison once described as quaintly eccentric and very
British, “the inner essence of Victoria.” Together with a lively
text, they bring this Canadian landmark into the spotlight it deserves.