AA-2026-587634
On the image
The Canadian Pacific Railway built the Banff Springs Hotel in the Rocky Mountains in 1888 on the sensible theory that if you dropped a Scottish baronial castle into the wilderness, wealthy people would travel enormous distances to sleep in it. They were right. By the 1950s, the hotel had become one of those destinations that Canadians and American tourists visited not despite its absurd grandeur but entirely because of it — the steeply pitched green copper rooflines, the limestone turrets, the whole improbable pile of it rising out of a conifer forest with Sulphur Mountain filling the frame behind it as though the mountain had been hired for the purpose.
Somewhere inside, a guest was almost certainly writing a postcard describing the scenery as 'breathtaking' and the dining room as 'very reasonable, all things considered.' The hotel's genius, perfected over six decades by the time this was taken, was making people feel they had discovered something remote and magnificent while providing them with bellhops, a golf course, and hot running water.
The Canadian flag flies from the central flagpole, a small factual detail that pins the whole scene to a particular national self-confidence — postwar Canada promoting its own landscape as a luxury product, and the Banff Springs as the proof point.
Visually related — by likeness
Banff Springs Hotel, Banff National Park, Alberta, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-587634. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/banff-springs-hotel-banff-national-park-alberta-1950s-587634.
@misc{aaAA2026587634,
title = {Banff Springs Hotel, Banff National Park, Alberta, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-587634},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/banff-springs-hotel-banff-national-park-alberta-1950s-587634}
}TY - ART TI - Banff Springs Hotel, Banff National Park, Alberta, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-587634 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/banff-springs-hotel-banff-national-park-alberta-1950s-587634 ER -
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