Canadian Pacific Railway president William Van Horne, the same man who’d already built Banff Springs and the Château Frontenac, commissioned this Calgary hotel from architect Lawrence Gotch of the Montreal firm E. and W.S. Maxwell, breaking ground in May 1911 on land the railway already owned. P. Lyall and Sons Construction Company spent three years building the eight-story Edwardian tower in Chicago-style architecture, and it opened without ceremony on June 1, 1914, its first guest a Winnipeg banker named Charles Rowley.
Four additional floors went up in 1929 to keep pace with the city’s growth, making the Palliser Calgary’s tallest building until 1958. Future Canadian Prime Minister R.B. Bennett lived at the hotel intermittently between 1922 and 1938, keeping a regular table by the lobby fireplace, a fixture Calgarians fought successfully to save when a 1960s renovation threatened to remove it for kitchen access. The Palliser and Edmonton’s Hotel Macdonald were the first properties in Alberta licensed to serve alcohol after Prohibition ended in 1924.