Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth () is a historic grand hotel in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. With 950 rooms and 21 floors it is the largest hotel in the province of Quebec, and the second largest Fairmont hotel in Canada after the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto, which has 1365 rooms. Located at 900 René Lévesque Boulevard West, in the heart of Downtown Montreal, it is connected to Central Station and to the underground city. The hotel is well known for being the location for John Lennon and Yoko Ono recording "Give Peace a Chance" in Room 1742 during their 1969 anti-war Bed-In. History The Queen Elizabeth () opened on April 15, 1958. The hotel was built and owned by the Canadian National Railway and operated by Hilton Hotels International, though it was never branded as a Hilton. Canadian National Railway selected leading architects and designers to give the interior decoration a "New France" theme, using Quebec handicrafts. The artists included Albert Edward Cloutier (carved wooden panels), Jean Dallaire (wall hanging), Marius Plamondon (stained glass mural), Claude Vermette (ceramic tiles) and Julien Hébert (bronze elevator doors). Cloutier painted a mural for the main dining room of the Salle Bonaventure in the hotel. There was controversy over naming the hotel: Quebec nationalists wanted it called Château Maisonneuve in honour of Montreal's founder, Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve. CN's president, Donald Gordon, insisted it be named for the queen, who had unexpectedly come to the throne in 1952 while the hotel was still on the drawing board. The French name, Le Reine Élizabeth, may appear startling, because of the use of the masculine article le, but the article does not actually apply to the feminine noun Reine. Instead, it applies to the implied masculine noun Hôtel (as in Le Ritz). Many famous guests have stayed there, including Queen Elizabeth II (four times) and the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Prince Charles, Fidel Castro, who was the first head of state to visit the hotel, Charles de Gaulle, and Princess Grace of Monaco, during Expo '67, Indira Gandhi, Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Sadiq Raji, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Perry Como, Joan Crawford, John Travolta, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and George W. Bush. The hotel reached worldwide fame when John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had been refused entry into the United States, conducted their Bed-In in Room 1742 at the