The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway commissioned this Châteauesque hotel from the Montreal firm Ross and MacFarlane, the same architects behind Fairmont Château Laurier in Ottawa, and construction took four years before it opened July 5, 1915, on a limestone bluff above the North Saskatchewan River. Named for Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, the hotel became known locally as simply The Mac and quickly established itself as the center of Edmonton’s social life.
A jarring 1953 addition, a plain 16-story tower built to add rooms, earned the unaffectionate nickname the Mac and the box it came in among Edmontonians, though it was demolished in 1986. The original hotel closed in 1983 and sat abandoned for eight years, threatened with demolition until the City of Edmonton designated it a Municipal Heritage Resource in 1985, its first such designation. Canadian Pacific Hotels rescued and restored the building in 1991, and it earned Edmonton’s first Michelin Guide recognition decades later.