Don’t expect Mayor Naheed Nenshi to shed a tear for the Cecil Hotel when the notorious tavern faces the wrecking ball this week.
The Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) announced Monday demolition of the hotel — a hotspot for criminal activity when it closed in 2008 — would start Tuesday.
“I want to be wistful about this … but I got to tell you, there are too many bad memories associated with that place,” Nenshi told reporters. “I’m actually not sad to see it come down.”
The city paid $10.9 million for the property in 2008 after ordering the hotel’s closure. Structural assessments determined the century-old building could not be salvaged.
The CMLC removed the iconic neon Cecil Hotel roof sign earlier this year so it could be restored.
Demolition of the hotel will be overseen by the CMLC, which acquired the site with plans to develop a mixed-use project on the site. An adjacent building, formerly known as Beer Land, will also be demolished.
The Cecil opened in 1912 with 54 rooms that provided short-term housing for boom-era workers. Decades later, the hotel’s tavern became synonymous with illicit drugs, prostitution, violence and destitution.
By October 2008, when a 23-year-old was stabbed to death, police were being called five times daily to the hotel. Soon after, City Hall suspended the Cecil tavern’s business licence.
Fires and the 2013 flood took a toll on the building’s structural integrity. A recent assessment found deteriorating shoring beams, missing posts, corroded steel supports and unsupported timber beams.
Nenshi said the lot would remain vacant for “a while” but that the city has a good reputation of finding temporary uses for unused sites to avoid blight.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen there, but I anticipate we’re going to be able to do something special and wonderful there,” Nenshi said.
“I don’t want to be trite about it,” he said. “Bad stuff happened there and we should honour the memory of the folks that were there and what happened there but it’s also time to not have places where bad stuff happens.”
Demolition of the hotel and the smaller adjacent building is scheduled to start Tuesday, Dec. 8 at 8 a.m. and take five to seven days to complete.
A spokeswoman for the CMLC said traffic would not be impacted during workdays.