Chateau Qu'Appelle
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Chateau Qu'Appelle was a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway hotel planned for Regina, Saskatchewan that was never built.
The hotel was planned for the corner of Albert Street and 16th Avenue (now College Avenue ) where the Royal Saskatchewan Museum now stands.
Designed in the Scottish baronial style, the pilings for the Chateau Qu'Appelle were sunk, and the hotel's girders were already up when construction was halted on the grand railway hotel. World War I had broken out, and the combination of labour shortages and material rationing meant that the lavish hotel's construction would be delayed until after the war. However, construction was never to resume. In 1919, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway went bankrupt. The Canadian National Railway, a government-owned venture, eventually acquired the GTP's lines, but the construction project was never completed.
There were two sub-stories of reinforced concrete basement under the northwest corner of Wascana Park. The basement was sunk in 1913 to support the ten-story Chateau Qu'Appelle. For ten years, the five-storey-high steel skeleton of the Chateau Qu'Appelle became an embarrassing eyesore for the town. The land was eventually given back to the city, and the girders were dismantled. The steel beams from the project were eventually used in the construction of Regina's new lavish railroad hotel, the Hotel Saskatchewan.
The Royal Saskatchewan Museum, built to celebrate the province's 50th anniversary, now stands on the site of the ill-fated Chateau Qu'Appelle Hotel. Partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to avoid the expansive task of uprooting the pilings, the museum was built on an angle.
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