The Janion 1891
by Maria Angelica Maira
Title
The Janion 1891
Artist
Maria Angelica Maira
Medium
Photograph - Photography - Digital Art - Fine Art Photography
Description
The Janion opened as a railroad hotel with 48 bedrooms. The Daily Colonist pronounced it a creditable and commodious hotel, noting every room was to be lit by electricity. The proprietors offered Sunday chicken dinners for 25 cents, promising in paid advertisements only white cooks employed.
The hotel lacked a liquor licence, limiting prospects in rough-and-tumble Victoria, still then the provinces commercial centre.
Less than a year after the first guest checked in, the sheriff held a cash auction at the hotel to disperse carpets, stoves and the contents of bedroom suites. Barroom furniture also went under the hammer for a hotel that sold nothing stronger than carbonated soda.
The building was then used as a warehouse, an assayers office, a cold storage facility, and, briefly, as the bottling plant for Pacific Beer, an ironic development considering its construction as a temperance hotel. For many years, the old building housed the offices of the Lake of the Woods Milling Co. and the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, whose terminus was just outside the front door.
The building has been vacant now for almost 35 years.
Uploaded
July 15th, 2014
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