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Lord Elgin Hotel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lord Elgin Hotel is a prominent hotel in downtown Ottawa, Canada with 355 guest rooms, located on Elgin Street at Laurier Avenue, across from Confederation Park. The twelve-storey limestone structure was named after James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, the first Governor General of the united Canadas.
The hotel was designed by the prestigious firm of Ross and Macdonald, which designed many of Canada's landmark hotels, and was opened in 1941 by the Ford Hotel Company to compete with the Château Laurier. Unlike the Château, however, the Lord Elgin was built to primarily serve short-stay guests, particularly those who were in Ottawa on government and military business during the Second World War. As a result, the hotel did not originally contain any ballrooms or elegant restaurants, as would have been expected in a large hotel at that time, and the guest rooms were relatively small.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the hotel's impressive facade hid the decline in its fortunes, and the Lord Elgin increasingly became known as a lower-end budget hotel. Significant renovations in the 1990s and 2000s resulted in the construction of large additions to the north and south of the building, the refurbishment and enlargement of existing rooms, and the addition of 60 new guestrooms, new meeting rooms and a new fitness facility.