Ward 11 Alderman Brian Pincott | City of Calgary Office of the Aldermen

On March 11th, I had the opportunity to tour through The Cecil Hotel.  The City of Calgary assumed possession of the hotel on February 27th and has been undergoing cleanup of the building since then. In the near future, the building will be razed and the site redeveloped to fit in with the East Village redevelopment that is ongoing.
 
For as long as I have lived in Calgary the Cecil has had a 'bad' reputation. Yet a 1914 edition of "the Albertan" describes the Cecil as "a cosy resort permeated with fellowship."
 
How did a place so described evolve into the place we came to know it as? A place that generated 1700 Police and EMS calls per year (4-5 calls per day, every day of the year!)
 
I wanted a chance to see the inside of the Cecil before it came down. I wanted to see if there were any remnants of the cozy resort, any evidence of the fellowship that described the hotel's beginnings.
 
It was quite something to see the state the hotel had fallen into. It was an eye opening experience to see the conditions in which some Calgarians lived, for some, many years had been lived in the hotel. The rooms are meagre and spare, the shared washroom facilities are basic, to say the least. In a word, the experience was heart-wrenching.
 
There were some fun little discoveries, like old skates hanging in the basement and the old furniture scattered throughout the hotel. There was the faintest of echoes that reminded me of its roots as one of those old style rural hotels; with the bar on the groundfloor and the rooms above. I have posted some pictures on this website for people to have a look, check out our gallery page.

The Cecil is a great part of our history as a city; it was one of the original old hotels in Calgary. And, to be blunt about it, little, if any, of that history has survived. With the exception of the handful of stories that those who lived or stayed there over the years, we, sadly, lost the historic Cecil Hotel many years ago.