Buildings

Red River College Princess Street Campus

Formerly:Drake Hotel
Benson Block
Red River College Princess Street Campus
Holt Block
Address:146 Princess Street
Use:Educational
Original Use:Mixed-use
Constructed:1882
Architects:Charles and Earle Barber
Tours:Part of the QR Code Tour

More Information

Canada's Historic Places

Design Characteristics

Style:Italianate

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
  • 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.
  • Source: City of Winnipeg Committee on Environment Minutes, June 18, 1979
  • For more information:
  • http://www.winnipeg.ca/ppd/historic/pdf-consv/Princess%20146-short.pdf