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Canada's Historic Places

Design Characteristics

Links & Related Buildings

• The Drake Hotel is the restored east facade of a modestly sized, three-storey brick building erected in 1882 and now integrated into a modern college complex in Winnipeg's Exchange District, a national historic site of Canada. The City of Winnipeg designation applies to the east wall on its footprint.
• Heritage Value
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• The Drake Hotel, an exuberant example of Victorian-era commercial Italianate architecture, is part of a significant nineteenth-century Winnipeg streetscape preserved in situ in facade form. Designed by Barber and Barber, the city's foremost architects during the boom of 1881-82, the hotel, like its twin neighbour to the north, is alive with cast-iron ornamentation, bracketed pediments, paired windows and symmetrical patterning in brick. This exceptional facade adorned a strategically situated, mixed-use building erected as a speculative venture in what was then an emerging commercial area around Market Square and City Hall. Over time the structure's pre-1900 streetscape, one of the oldest in the historic Exchange District, remained largely intact, allowing the facades of the five member buildings to be sensitively incorporated into a modern development project, the Red River College Princess Street Campus.
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• Source: City of Winnipeg Committee on Environment Minutes, June 18, 1979
• For more information:
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• http://www.winnipeg.ca/ppd/historic/pdf-consv/Princess%20146-short.pdf