The Architectural Economy of Reform: Commerce, Class, and the Newfoundland Hotel

ABSTRACT Canada’s grand railway hotels are a celebrated building type. However, historians have paid little attention to the economic strictures of the hotel type in Canada, or to their role in inscribing networks of commerce and finance onto the North American landscape. This article proposes the Newfoundland Hotel as an exemplary case study to explore these networks. Born of a late nineteenth-century desire to diversify Newfoundland’s economy away from the fishery, the hotel later suffered insolvency and from the prerogatives of corporate investment interests. The building was also involved in a series of changes to the organisation of Newfoundland as a political state, which saw ownership of the hotel pass from private to public hands and elevated it from a provincial to a national concern. Designed by the preeminent Montreal firm of Ross and Macdonald in 1926, the Newfoundland Hotel attempted to consolidate a class-based vision of financial modernity in a resource-dependent economy. In discussing the hotel’s construction, use and demolition, this essay explores how a series of contestations over class, culture and nationhood were manifest in the project’s turbulent financial affairs. It highlights the need to study the financial history of buildings alongside their material and social features to understand more fully how economic pressures shape the valuation of buildings over time.