The Northern Hotel
Opened in 1885, after fire destroyed the Queen's Hotel, the Northern was considered by many to be the best hotel between Winnipeg and Toronto. The building, designed by local architect, R.J. Edwards, was a derivation of the Queen Anne style called "modern renaissance." The upper floors had large, elegantly finished verandahs which also acted as fire escapes. The interior decor was considered some of the finest work in the region; the main drawing room and parlour on the second floor housed a splendid marble-mantled English fireplace which is currently on exhibit on the museum's third floor. The hotel featured a writing room, a reading room, marble washrooms, a tobacco store and barber shop, an elegant dining room measuring 76' x 25', commercial rooms for business travellers, and, of course, a bar and billiards room. Many will remember the large stained glass window that graced the stairwell. Every one of its 100 rooms had running water, fed by a 5,000 gal. tank on the roof, and electricity throughout. It has often been said that a tunnel under Water Street linked the hotel to the wharfs and was used during Prohibition to smuggle alcohol into the hotel, but no convincing evidence of this has been presented. There was, however, a cave in the basement where the hotel's pet bear hibernated each winter. The Northern later became the Mariaggi and then the Marina Inn before being torn down in the 1980s.
