AA-2026-066536
On the image
The Canadian Pacific Railway built the Banff Springs Hotel in 1888 on the theory that if you erected a Scottish baronial castle in the Alberta Rockies and charged enough for a room, wealthy people would travel three days by train to sleep in it. They were right, and by the 1950s the hotel had become one of those destinations that middle-class North Americans added to their vacation itineraries to signal that they had arrived at the kind of life that included destinations.
From this elevated vantage above the Bow Valley, the building's steeply pitched copper-green rooflines and gothic dormers sit against Sulphur Mountain with the studied confidence of a structure that was never going to pretend it belonged there naturally. The postwar tourist boom meant the Rockies were filling up with families in station wagons who had read about the hotel in a magazine and decided that wilderness was more enjoyable when it came with afternoon tea.
Somewhere below those arched colonnades at ground level, a parking lot was quietly being expanded to accommodate the new reality that guests were arriving by car rather than by rail, which was exactly the development the Canadian Pacific Railway had not planned for when it spent a century running the place as a monument to its own vision of civilized travel.
Visually related — by likeness
Banff Springs Hotel, Banff National Park, Alberta, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-066536. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/banff-springs-hotel-banff-national-park-alberta-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026066536,
title = {Banff Springs Hotel, Banff National Park, Alberta, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-066536},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/banff-springs-hotel-banff-national-park-alberta-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Banff Springs Hotel, Banff National Park, Alberta, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-066536 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/banff-springs-hotel-banff-national-park-alberta-1950s ER -
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