187 Garry Street - LaClaire Hall / Windsor Hotel

© 2023, Christian Cassidy

Place: LaClaire Hall / Windsor Hotel
Address: 187 Garry Street
Constructed: 1903-04
Architect: Unknown

This building opened in 1904 as LaClaire Hall, a middle-class boarding house, and soon transitioned into the LaClaire hotel. Its name was changed to the Windsor Hotel in 1928. In February 2023 it is in the process of being sold and the remaining residents have until April to leave.

That's round 25 people who will unfortunately have to find a new home in a segment of the market that has lost thousands of units in just the last few years.

Here's a look back at one of the few remaining downtown single room occupancy hotels.

Forrester ca. 1920

The man who funded the construction of LaClaire Hall was businessman Charles Henry Forrester. Born in Ontario, Forrester came to Winnipeg in 1899 with his wife Celia and at least two children. One was a daughter named Claire, which is how LaClaire got its name.

Forrester had various business interests and in 1900 added to them by buying a hotel in Whitemouth, Manitoba and the Tremont Hotel at 268 Fort Street in Winnipeg. He and a business partner by the last name of Carroll, (perhaps Edward Carroll who owned he Dominion Hotel), received a building permit for LaClaire Hall in 1903.

A Tribune reporter visited the building in its latter stages of construction in March 1904 and described it as four storeys with basement measuring 100-feet deep by about 50-feet wide. Both Mr. And Mrs. Forrester oversaw the interior decor. "The finest" carpets were ordered from the Hudson's Bay Company and attention was paid to every light fixture and piece of linen.

Each floor had a spacious balcony and Mr. Forrester had plans to install a large summer garden on the roof for guests. As with most hotels at that time, there were no en suite bathrooms but baths and toilets were provided on every floor.

The basement was reserved for mechanical, luggage storage and a large kitchen that would initially be run by Jules Gondial and Co. of the Fort Garry Cafe.

The reporter did not mention how many rooms were in the building, but it spoke of spacious "suites" on each floor with just a handful of rooms for shorter term guests.

April 19, 1904 Morning Telegram

LaClaire Hall began advertising for kitchen and dining room staff in April 1904 and the residence first appears in the 1905 Henderson's street directory, the data for which would have been compiled in 1904.

The directory lists at least a dozen residents, likely just the longer-term ones, many of whom were from occupations one would expect to find in a boarding house, such as travelling salesmen and railway employees. Ads can also be found for doctors and other professionals using the LaClaire as temporary lodgings until they found a permanent residence.

Here is a partial list of residents from 1904. Note that only the head of household is listed, so there could be spouses and even children in some of the suites:

Grace Fuller - milliner;
William Galbraith - clerk at Carruthers Johnson and Bradley dry goods store;
Hugh Wilson - furrier;
J. Gilbert - clerk at Great West Life;
Henry Holman - travelling salesman;
Morgan Williams - agent for New York Life Assurance Company;
Robtert Taylor - manager at the wholesale department of the HBC;
James Munro - HBC store employee;
John McPherson - paymaster at the CPR;
David W F Nichol - draughtsman for J.H.G. Russel architect;
John  P. O'Leary - building inspector for the CPR.

A sign that it was a quality house is that Forrester himself moved in with his family when it opened. They moved to a new house across the street at 216 Garry Street in December 1905.

May 10, 1906, Winnipeg Free Press

According to street directories, in 1905 LaClaire Hall consisted of two buildings - LaClaire boarding house at 187 Garry Street and the LaClaire Annex at 191 Garry Street. The annex was a separate  rooming / boarding house that existed at 191 Garry since at least 1902 that must have been purchased by Forrester or the next owner for additional capacity.

An ad that ran in 1905 after its conversion into a hotel notes that the LaClaire had 75 rooms which likely means that the annex had many of them, (even today, after being whittled down into single room occupancy hotel rooms, the main hotel building only has around 45 rooms.)

To get a sense of the size of the common spaces inside the main boarding house, in February 1905 the Forresters had an open house for up to 200 friends and colleagues. The Winnipeg Tribune society page noted that the entertainment largely took place in a couple of reception rooms and the "capacious dining hall." This "at home" reception was so popular that it became a regular event for the next year or two where management and guests welcomed their friends for an evening of music, cards and other entertainment.

October 5, 1916, Winnipeg Tribune

By the time the LaClaire opened Charles Forrester was already expanding his business empire. He started the Forrester Piano Company which was the local sales and repair outlet of the Oshawa-based R. S. Williams and Sons Piano Co. and then began to dabble in real estate. In 1906, he opened a real estate office in the Canada Life building and was part of several lucrative downtown land deals.

Operating a boarding house was something he was no longer interested in doing and in June 1905 he sold the business to John "Jack" Eggo, a former chief clerk with the CPR who fronted a group of investors called the LaClaire Hotel Company.

The investors would go on to build the build the Wellington Hotel further north on Garry Street and took over the neighbouring Mount Royal Hotel (now known as the Garrick) when its owners went bankrupt in 1908. Eggo became well-known in local business circles.

Despite being in his early forties, Eggo enlisted on September 14, 1915 and was killed in action one year later at the age of 43.

November 21, 1905, Winnipeg Tribune

Eggo and partners wasted little time with their plan to convert the building from a boarding house into a hotel. At the time they purchased the business they already had a five-year lease agreement with Olaf N. A. Miller to run it.

Miller had worked for the hotel system of the Santa Fe Railroad Co. before coming to Canada to work for the CPR dining car and hotel department. He was the manager of the Banff National Park hot springs resort when it first opened.

LaClaire Hall was "renovated and refurbished" and reopened as the LaClaire Hotel in November 1905.
One write-up said that it contained 75 rooms and a large dining room. (The annex side must have been large as the current Windsor Hotel only has 44 rooms.)

One thing the new hotel didn't have was a public bar. This was due to the provincial government restricting the number of liquor licenses given out in the downtown at the time.

The name LaClaire Hall didn't disappear completely. Without a liquor licence to fill a bar, the annex was converted into a 'bachelors residence' that carried on under the LaClaire Hall name until around 1909 when a liquor permit was finally sorted.

November 20, 1912, Winnipeg Tribune

Gilbert Todd, a former manager of the Empire Hotel, and John Lee, a co-owner of the St. Regis Hotel, bought the LaClaire Hotel in 1912. The building underwent extensive interior renovations and redecorating. This included guest rooms receiving new furniture, hot and cold running water, and telephones.

The refurbished hotel re-opened in November 1912, just in time for one of the worst periods for hoteliers in the city's history. Western Canada fell into a recession in 1913 that saw grain prices and Winnipeg land values plummet. Then, World War I put a halt to most leisure travel across the country.

Charles Chaplin, ca. 1912 (University of Washington Library)

It was into this newly renovated hotel that the LaClaire received its most famous guest.

A young actor named Charles Chaplin was in town in August 1913 as part of a Karno's touring British vaudeville that performed at the Empress Theatre on Portage Avenue East. His stay at the LaClaire has been immortalized thanks to a ten-page latter he wrote to is brother on hotel letterhead that was preserved by the Chaplin family archives. (More about Chaplin's time in Winnipeg, including at the LaClaire Hotel, at this post on my West End Dumplings blog!)

The city's railway hotels fared better during this period of curtailed travel as they had a steady flow of passengers that could be funnelled into their rooms but independent hotels struggled. Some went bust, most notably the Olympia Hotel which reopened after the war as the Marlborough Hotel. Todd and Lee suffered the same fate as the LaClaire Hotel was seized by creditors and auctioned off in May 1915.

September 20, 1915, Winnipeg Tribune

The LaClaire was advertising again in September 1915 but under the "furnished rooms for rent" section of the paper, not the hotel section.

It boasted a "home-like hotel" with monthly room rates ranging from $10 to $16 and the option of buying a meal plan in its cafe. It is clear that the new owner(s) thought there was a better chance to make money with the LaClaire as a boarding house / apartment block than as a short-term stay hotel.

The LaClaire did not advertise in late 1915 or through 1916 but it was operating as a couple of soldiers who enlisted in 1916 used it as their home address.

May 23, 1922, Winnipeg Tribune

Another blow for local hoteliers was Prohibition which made the sale of alcohol illegal in Manitoba between 1916 and 1923.

Many smaller hotels, which relied more heavily on bar sales to pay the bills, ran into financial difficulty. Some closed or were taken over by creditors while others tried to make a go of it with a "dry bar" serving soft drinks. A few decided to take their chances and sell alcohol illegally.

The LaClaire seems to have played it safe during Prohibition. It only appears in newspapers once, in May 1922, for breaching the law when its bar manager was fined for selling "strong beer".

With its 75 rooms and a restaurant to bring in revenue, the LaClaire muddled through the Prohibition era but it took several owners and managers to make a go of it.

September 12, 1919, Winnipeg Tribune

Advertising resumed for the LaClaire in the hotel section of the newspapers in January 1917 under M. T. W. Lloyd. The one sentence classified ads notes that daily, weekly and monthly room rates were available.

Jim Jeffrey, formerly of the Mercantile Hotel in Portage la Prairie and a vice president of the Manitoba Hoteliers Association, took over the hotel in August 1918. The following August, while vacationing with his family at their cabin at Grand Beach, he died in his sleep at the age of 53.

Peter A. Moyer, who ran the nearby Winnipeg Hotel, bought the LaClaire from the Jeffrey family and in September 1919 began advertising it as a family hotel with a refurbished dining room. A sign that he tried to make the place more upscale was the jump in rates. In some of Lloyd's ads the daily rate for the hotel was "fifty cents and up" and under Moyer the daily rate was $2.50.

By November, Moyer was advertising a nightly Supper Dance in the hotel's "spacious and attractively decorated dining-room" promising an excellent floor, good music and the best of refreshments and drinks. The dances lasted just a few weeks.

Moyer's name disappears from the hotel's ads by 1921 and a 1926 ad shows that daily rates had dropped to "$1 and up" for a nightly stay. It is hard to tell if he sold the hotel or perhaps just leased it to someone else to operate which was a common practice for hoteliers with multiple properties.

September 14, 1929, Winnipeg Tribune

The Windsor Hotel Company was established in May 1928 and applied for a liquor permit for the hotel in advance of purchasing it. The president of the company was Joshua B. Gray of the Tourist Hotel in St. Boniface and the hotel manger was John MacHale.

The company is said to have spent $100,000 to renovate the building inside and out before reopening in September. The renovations included knocking down the old annex and constructing an "all brick building to be used as a beer parlour."

What is interesting about Joshua B. Gray getting a hotel license is his track record as a hotelier. From 1921 to 1924 he was the owner of the Wolseley (now Mount Royal) Hotel, the Garrick Hotel, the Corona Hotel and part-owner of the Sherman Hotel. (Some of the hotel interests he inherited after the death of his father in 1922).

In 1923, Gray paid an eye-watering $3,500 in fines for serving alcohol during Prohibition at the Garrick Hotel. In 1924, another raid at the Garrick found 50 people openly drinking and the patrons, bar staff and Gray were all arrested. While Gray was out on appeal there were more infractions and he would eventually serve three months in jail.

Normally, hotel owners got around such fines and jail time by leasing out their bar to someone else to run even if they were still in charge of things. In the case of Gray, it seems that the drinking was so flagrant that officials felt he knew about it and approved of it.

Gray was later charged with running a betting house at the Tourist Hotel in 1927. It seems the betting carried over to the Windsor as well as Gray and his company sued Louis Silverman, ("Winnipeg's biggest bookmaker" according to a Tribune story), for $6,024 he/the hotel lent Silverman to cover loses he made on a series of horse racing bets.

Gray sold the hotel in 1938 and died on February 1, 1941.

June 4, 1962, Winnipeg Tribune

Syd Wainwright took over the operation of the hotel in December 1938. He was a long-time employee of Drewry's Brewery and knew the hotel business from a salesman's point of view.

Extensive renovations were made to make the dining room into a banquet area with the hopes of attracting sports clubs and fraternal organizations wanting to hold luncheons and dinners.

Fred Sneesby was the manger in 1942.

The Windsor ca. 1950 (Full version: Manitoba Historical Maps)

As the 1950s came, small downtown hotels like the Windsor began to lose out to new-style motels and motor inns located on the periphery of downtown and in the suburbs. These increasingly became the go-to places for wedding socials, sports banquets, and social club luncheons.

Reporting on the goings on at these old hotels, including changes in ownership and management, became less newsworthy and when they did make the news the manager or spokesperson for the business that owned the hotel was often anonymous.

Modern high-rise hotels found their way downtown in the early 1970s. The Winnipeg Inn (now Fairmont) opened in 1970, the Northstar Inn (now Radisson) in 1971, and the Holiday Inn (now Delta) in 1974. This pushed these old hotels to the periphery of the hotel market with their tiny, single room occupancy rooms, no parking, and dated beverage rooms and banquet facilities.

August 10, 1967, Swan Valley Star and Times

Gerry and Anne Ayotte of Swan River owned both the Cambridge Hotel and Windsor Hotel in the late 1960s. A couple of 1969 ads in the Free Press announced that the Windsor was under "New Ownership" but didn't state who that new owner was.

Rick Penner bought the hotel in the 1970s and the beverage room regularly featured live music as required by hotel beverage room liquor licenses at the time. Early in the decade exotic dancers were also part of the mix and by the end of the decade a weekly disco dance party was a fixture.

In 1987, live music again took centre stage at the beverage room and in the 1990s it had a distinctive blues flavour.

Source: The Murals of Winnipeg

Ads show Zora Young and her Chicago Blues Posse played there in 1993, Blues artist JP Lepage had a CD release show there in 1997, Blues guitarist Little Sue Foley came in 1998, Louisiana Red in 1999. Local Blues legend Big Dave MacLean was a regular feature through the 1990s and early 2000s.

In a Free Press interview in the 2000s, Penner said that during his tenure the Windsor's stage had been "graced by almost every significant blues act in Canada and the U.S.."

Penner sold the hotel to business partner Isaac Leger around 2004. He requested that the building be considered for possible "historic building" status with the city but the status was declined. He sold it in 2008.

The Windsor was up for sale by late 2009. Rumours of its demolition sparked a rally outside the building in January 2010 to try to help save the beloved, low-cost music venue.

Wayne Towns purchased the hotel in March 2010. Given his track record with his former establishment, the Royal Albert Hotel on Albert Street, live music was again assured to take centre stage. A 'welcome back' concert was held in April featuring Big Dave MacLean and Blues band Rumblefish.

In more recent years, the stage became an important one for the local punk and metal scene but the hotel had become much more dangerous. After a shooting at the hotel in early January 2020, a show called "One last showdown at the Windsor" was held later that month to mark the closing of the music venue portion of the building.

It was announced in February 2023 that the Windsor Hotel was in the process of being sold as a redevelopment property and the twenty-five or so remaining tenants have until the end of April to leave.

This has concerned many housing advocates as residential opportunities available for those on the lower rungs of the housing ladder, be it SRO hotel rooms, rooming house beds, or public housing units, has been in sharp decline in recent years.

Update: In September 2023, a major fire happened at the Windsor Hotel and the structure was demolished. (Also see.)