A moment in history: May 29, 1931

On this day in 1931, the city's oldest hotel was hoping to lure visiting sports teams to enjoy its hot and cold running water.

The Alberta Hotel might bear the name of the province, but it is actually the older of the two by a couple of decades. Not as a place to sleep, but rather a place to grab a drink. Luke Kelly opened his one-storey saloon on Jasper Avenue in 1883. Four years later, he added a second floor and started to rent out rooms, renaming his establishment the Alberta Hotel, the first of its kind in the province.

He would continue to run the hotel out of that two-storey wooden building until 1903, when the more famous structure of stone and brick was built on the same spot. Architect James E. Wize designed the new hotel, including the five-storey tower that rose to a small observation room lined with stained-glass windows. The original wooden building was moved north and attached to the side of the new hotel.

At the time, the Alberta Hotel was one of the finer accommodations in western Canada, and it introduced a long list of luxuries not yet seen in the province. It was the first hotel in Alberta to be equipped with telephones and a call system to reach the front desk. It boasted shower baths and Alberta's first passenger elevator. The Alberta Hotel became the place to stay for wealthy and influential visitors to Edmonton, including then-prime minister Wilfrid Laurier, who stayed there the night before he officially inaugurated Alberta as a province in 1905.

The hotel saw a few expansions and renovations over the next couple of decades as the city grew and the number of travellers increased. The original wooden structure was lost to fire in 1934, but the hotel would remain on Jasper Avenue for more than 75 years. During the 1970s, it hit uncertain times. There was an attempt to demolish it in 1977, which was scrapped after a public outcry. But it was a short reprieve. The building was demolished in 1984 to make way for Canada Place.

But, unlike many of Edmonton's early hotels, it didn't disappear. During the demolition, great care was taken to carefully preserve and number the 5,000 sandstone bricks that made up the hotel's exterior. There was a strong desire to save parts of the hotel, but no clear plan for what exactly to do with them. So they were packed away and stored in a city facility.

There they sat for nearly 30 years, until architect Gene Dub made a plan to resurrect the Alberta Hotel — or at least the outside of it. The idea was for a new Alberta Hotel built with modern materials, clad in the original bricks. But the plan hit an unexpected problem. While in storage, moisture had washed away the numbers on the bricks, leaving little clue as to how the whole thing fit together. Even worse, some of the original bricks had gone missing. Dub had to rent a warehouse to solve the problem, turning the 5,000-ish bricks into a giant sandstone jigsaw puzzle that stonemasons pieced together.

It worked. The reconstructed Alberta Hotel was finished in 2010, a sandstone's throw away from its original location. It is now the home of another Alberta institution, CKUA, which owns the building. At the end of last year, the non-profit broadcaster received $10.9 million in funding from the federal government. Some of those funds are earmarked for renovating and modernizing parts of the Alberta Hotel building.

This clipping was found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist Rev Recluse of Vintage Edmonton.