indoor pool with a skylight, a fitness centre, a whirlpool, a sauna, and steam rooms. In 1929, a tunnel was built under Front Street West, in order to provide guests of the hotel with direct access to Union Station. The tunnel connecting the hotel to Union Station was later connected with the larger PATH underground city, a series of tunnels that connects various buildings in Downtown Toronto. In 1987, the city adopted the role of the coordinating agency for the tunnel network. History The Royal York Hotel was not the first hotel built on the property, with the first hotel being built in 1843, known originally as the Ontario Terrace. After the original hotel was refurbished in 1853, the building was renamed the Sword's Hotel, and then the Revere Hotel after a change in ownership in 1860. Thomas Dick bought the hotel back in 1862, renovated it again, and named it Queen's Hotel. In 1874, the Queen's Hotel was purchased by Thomas McGaw and Henry Winnett, hoteliers of Upper Canada, who also owned the Queen's Royal Hotel in Niagara on the Lake, but when McGaw died, Winnett purchased the partnership from his estate in 1919 and in 1920 formed a limited liability company of which he was president, also later acquiring McGaw's interests in their hotels. The Queen's Hotel was billed as "One of the largest and most comfortable hotels in the Dominion of Canada." After Winnett's death in 1925, his estate sold the Queen's Hotel to the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), run by then-president Sir Edward Wentworth Beatty. Later, Canadian Pacific announced its intention to demolish the Queen's Hotel to build the largest hotel in the British Commonwealth on its site. Construction on the new hotel began in 1927 and was completed in 1929. Named the Royal York, the new hotel cost $16 million when built. The completed hotel featured over 1,000 guest rooms, each equipped with radios, private showers, and bathtubs, a library, a 12-bed hospital, and a telephone switchboard. The hotel also operated St. George's Golf and Country Club as the Royal York Golf Club from 1930 to 1946, when the hotel's parent company, Canadian Pacific Railway, divested itself from the golf course property. The building was officially opened on 11 June 1929 by The Viscount Willingdon, the Governor General of Canada, in "one of the most glittering social events in Toronto's history." The Toronto Board of