11 February 2010

A Jewel Overlooking the River

The Chateau Frontenac is the second oldest of Canada's grand old Canadian Pacific
Railway railway hotels from the late 19th century and early 20th century. It opened
in 1893, five years after the Banff Springs Hotel. Today most of these hotels are
owned by the Fairmont chain.

Quebec Quebec - Although tourism is a word that entered the English language in 1811, it wasn't until the dawn of the railway age a few decades later that tourism as we know it today started to, shall we say, gather steam. Leading the way in Canada was the Canadian Pacific Railway, with its trains and railway hotels, Montreal's Windsor Hotel, 1878-1981, was the CPR's first railway hotel. The oldest one still in operation is the Banff Springs Hotel, which opened in Banff, Alta., in 1888, the second oldest is Quebec City's Chateau Frontenac, which opened in 1893.
 
For its centennial celebration in 1993, the Chateau Frontenac introduced special guided tours, for guests and non-guests alike. They were an instant hit. They attracted a large and steady flow of people. The interest demonstrated just how much people see the Frontenac, and grand railway hotels in general, as part of our national heritage. Sixteen years later, the Frontenac's guided tours are still going strong. Fifty-minute tours are given daily, in French and English, to hotel guests and the public at large.
 

 
On a recent visit to the provincial capital, I took the English tour with my wife, my son, and a dozen other people, mostly tourists from Alberta. We were greeted in the hotel lobby by a young francophone woman, speaking English. She was wearing the uniform of a chambermaid from the hotel's early days. And she began by escorting us down the hallway that runs from the hotel's main entrance to the famous Bar St. Laurent overlooking Dufferin Terrace and the St. Lawrence River.
 
Along the hallway, we could see wall-mounted photographs of former guests like Charles Lindbergh, who landed his private plane on the Plains of Abraham in 1928 to bring a rare drug to a friend in the Jeffery Hale Hospital. Another photograph shows war-time leaders Winston Churchill of Britain, Franklin Roosevelt of the United States, and William Lyon Mackenzie King of Canada at the Quebec Conference in 1944, where the three planned the D-Day assault. Other pictures show Queen Elizabeth II with Premier Maurice Duplessis in 1959, shortly before his death, Monaco's Princess Grace in 1969, and U.S. President George W. Bush in 2001.
 
Standing in front of the Bar St. Laurent, with its distinctive round floor plan and nautical decor, we listened as our guide told us that the bar was originally the hotel's "writing room." Although it was officially reserved only for men, our guide said that it wasn't long before whispered rumours buzzed through Quebec City that women were being let inside, foreshadowing gender desegregation in 20th century.
 
Our guide pressed the button on the elevators in front of the Bar St. Laurent and directed our attention to the coat of arms on the elevator doors. It was the coat of arms of the man for whom the Chateau Frontenac was named, Louis de Baude, better known to students of Canadian history as Count Frontenac.
 
The coat of arms shows two griffins, or imaginary animals, with a royal crown containing nine pearls, nine signifying the status of a count. Frontenac spent two terms as governor general of New France in the late 1600s. Although not as well known as Samuel de Champlain, or Louis de Montcalm, Frontenac ruled over New France during the most powerful time in the colony's relatively short history. He oversaw the expansion of New France into what is now Ontario and the Mississippi Valley and he kept the Iroquois and English in check. Sir William Van Horne, chief executive of the CPR, knew what he was doing when he named the new CPR hotel in Quebec City after Frontenac.
 
The elevators took us from the Bar St. Laurent to the fifth floor, where we were escorted by our guide into Room 5151. It had a queen bed and a fireplace. On top of the bed was a model of the Chateau Frontenac that was about as big as a breadbox. Our guide directed our attention to the familiar main tower of the hotel, which, she told us, was not part of the hotel's original construction, as designed by U.S. architect Bruce Price (also architect of the original Banff Springs). Rather, the signature 21-storey central tower, designed by Edward and W.S. Maxwell of Montreal, was added in the early 1920s.
 
Holding the hotel maquette, our guide asked us to point to the room we thought we were in. Nobody had a clue. The guide told us to look out the window. The view was of Dufferin Terrace and the St. Lawrence River.
 
Now that we knew where we were relative to the river, our guide returned our attention to the hotel maquette and pointed to a tiny window that represented the room in which we were standing.
 
There we were, one small window speck amid the 600 window specks on her model, one for each of the hotel's 600 rooms today.
 
In the Chateau Frontenac, no two rooms are exactly alike. When the hotel opened in 1893, our guide said, there were only 170 rooms, including 93 with private bathrooms. The other rooms shared one shared bathroom on each floor. At the time, rooms with private bathrooms cost $3 a night, rooms without cost $1.75. To demonstrate the relative value of the rooms, our guide told us that chambermaids at the hotel earned $2 a month at the time, and school teachers $3 a month.
 
We left Room 5151 and walked down a corridor leading away from the St. Lawrence. We were told to look out a window on our left into an alleyway at the Fifth Floor Gardens, a small rooftop garden on top of the hotel's fourth-floor kitchen. It's the most exclusive piece of real estate at the Frontenac, our guide said. No guest, no matter how rich or famous, is allowed there. Only one person other than the gardeners can go inside, and that is the hotel's executive chef, Jean Soulard.
 
Through this same window, we could also see the Frontenac's familiar sheet-copper roofing. As a general rule, our guide explained, the original copper colour turns green after 25 years of exposure to air, and to yellow after 90 years. "When a section turns yellow, that's when we replace it," she said.
 
We went down two flights of stairs and were shown a very crooked hallway. Why was its crooked? she asked us. We didn't know.
 
The answer had to do with the way this particular section of the hotel, added in 1909, it had been built in accordance with an unconventional, crooked exterior property line at the time. The architect of this section, Walter Painter of Detroit, who was also architect of the lovely Le Capitol de Quebec, the theatre building in nearly Place D'Youville, obviously wanted to take advantage of every bit of space at his disposal.
 
The crooked hallway looked a little creepy to me, but it was the perfect backdrop for our next story. It was a love story involving Count Frontenac, himself. The godson of King Louis XIII, Frontenac grew up in the French royal court and married Marie de la Grange, a woman who was noted for her beauty. She was in France when he died in 1698.
 
His will asked that his heart be removed and taken in a silver box to his wife in France. Legend hasn't it that de la Grange refused it, saying that she never really had his heart in life, so she wasn't going to accept it in death, either.
 
Our little tour group was contemplating this love story as we continued down one floor to the hotel's second-floor grand ballroom. It was empty on this day, so we were able to go inside. The 10 grand chandeliers suspended from the ceiling were installed in 1967 to mark Canada's centennial year, one chandelier for each province. Cleaning one chandelier took a full week in 1967, said our guide. Today, with better tools and materials, all 10 can be cleaned in a week.
 
We made one last stop, at the top of the staircase leading from the second floor down to the lobby. You see the same staircase when you walk into the Chateau Frontenac through its main entrance and look to your left.
 
It's more like dual staircases, one set curls up to the left in clockwise fashion, the other to the right in counter-clockwise fashion.
 
While we were standing at the top, watching people coming and going in the lobby, our guide told us this story:
 
The year was 1993. The Frontenac had just began its centennial guided tours of the hotel. Then, as now, the tours ended on the top of this staircase. At the end of one tour, the guide noticed an elderly couple crying. Asked if anything was wrong, the couple said no, that they were crying out of joy. They were from New York City. For their honeymoon in 1933, they had come to Quebec City and stayed in the Frontenac. They had made a wish, that they could come back. And now here they were, back celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary.
 
"So here's what we are going to do," our own tour guide told our little group of anglo Montrealers and Albertans, with about an equal number of men as women. "We are going to finish this tour by everyone making a wish of their own, and then walking down the stairs all together. But we are going to do it in traditional fashion. Men on one side, and women on the other.
 
"And then when we get down to the bottom, we are going to kiss."