The Fort Garry Hotel—officially the Fort Garry Hotel, Spa and Conference Centre—is an early-20th-century hotel in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, that opened for the first time on December 11, 1913. Built by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, it is one of Canada's grand railway hotels and the only surviving remnant from that era in Winnipeg. It was designated as a National Historic Site of Canada in 1981, and as a Manitoba Provincial Heritage Site in 1990. A national heritage park connected to the hotel and to the remains of Upper Fort Garry was completed in 2017-2018. History The Fort Garry Hotel was built between 1911 and 1913 by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in order to service as a luxury accommodation for upper-class railway travellers. Constructed at a strategic location on Broadway, just one block from GTPR's Union Station, the hotel was one of many hotels built by Canadian railway companies in the early 20th century to encourage tourists to travel their transcontinental routes. Initially, the new hotel was to be called "The Selkirk Hotel" after the Selkirk Settlers, but was instead named after Upper Fort Garry, which once stood at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. It was designed by Montreal architects George Ross and David MacFarlane, who modelled their original plans for the hotel after Ottawa's Château Laurier; plans originally called for a 10-storey structure, but two floors were added during construction. Like the Laurier and other Canadian railway hotels, The Fort Garry was constructed in the "château style" (also termed the "neo-château" or "châteauesque" style), making it Manitoba’s only example of this architectural style. At the time of completion, the 13-storey hotel was the tallest structure in the city. The Fort Garry Hotel opened to the public at a grand ball on 10 December 1913, what the Manitoba Free Press called an "opening ball of great brilliancy." The hotel's early prominence led it to have many famous guests, including Nelson Eddy, Harry Belafonte, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Liberace, Arthur Fiedler, Louis Armstrong, Gordie Howe, Lester Pearson, as well as King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth, who stayed during their 1939 royal tour of Canada. The hotel was later owned by the Canadian National Railway after Grand Trunk was nationalized and absorbed into CN. In 1979, the hotel was purchased by the prominent John Draper Perrin family of Winnipeg, who operated it as an independent