Biographical Information:
A former reporter with the Edmonton Journal Lisa Gregoire now works as a freelance magazine journalist in Edmonton.
Introduction to essay:
Some of Edmonton's finest storytellers linger in the kinds of places your mother told you not to go. Writer Lisa Gregoire booked a room at some of Edmonton's older hotels - places like the Transit, the Hub, the Beverly Crest and the Jasper Place. She unpacked her notebook and pen, and sat down to listen.
Pete Christensen holds court in the tavern of the Jasper Place Hotel, back to the wall, a ball hat from Goodwill pulled snug over wisps of brown and gray. Wheat stock thin and just as frayed, Christensen has been unwinding here since the Beatles broke up. Sometimes, like now, he lives in the hotel upstairs, which makes this tavern his living room. The bartenders stock Old Milwaukee in tall cans just for him. Tonight, he's a conductor on a train of lost souls, pointing out the regular nomads, exiles and mischief makers.
Ted "Teddy Bear" Tywonuk worked construction all his life. Twenty-six years in the union. His hands, wide as rakes, helped build the Suncor and Syncrude plants in Fort McMurray. He's Polish, 75 and uses a walker now. "Everyone know me," he says. "I never complain. I just sit here. I sit in my chair."
Michael Potts, a Stoney band member with a long black pony tail and lively brown eyes, has lived in Room 202 for 10 years. Childhood ailments left him with a shorter right leg and a humble disposition. "Somewhere in the world, there's someone shorter on the left side and we fit together," he says.
Sam White, a door-sized Cree from Alexander First Nation near Morinville, spent most of his days digging coal underground. His voice is so deep it sounds like he left it there. "I got caved in once," he says, hands gesturing above his head to indicate things falling down. "I prayed a lot. I was there 27 hours." White was the 10th customer through the door when the tavern opened on July 11, 1952. Tonight, he wears a T-shirt from the hotel's 50th anniversary party in 2002.
Christensen pulls out a chair for White and the two trade stories of when Stony Plain Road was a dirt trail through miles of bog. White laughs about drinking and playing the fiddle behind Al's barber shop which used to be across the street. Al sometimes abandoned a haircut halfway through once he got into the whiskey, encouraging customers to return the next morning for the other half. They talk of rafting in the slough where West Edmonton Mall is now and how Ed Brown of Brown's Men's Wear always gave customers a free pair of pantyhose "for the wife." The conversation eventually weaves its way into the present.
"We're all brothers," says White, 75, who leans on the same cane his grandfather did. "If I have a buck and he needs it, I give it to him. If he has a buck and I need it, he gives it to me. And if someone dies, we all go to the funeral."
Cities remember their famous citizens by affixing names to bridges, roads, hills, buildings and parks. Edmonton namesakes belong to the likes of millionaire John Walter, judge Emily Murphy, mayor William Hawrelak, alderman Thomas Bellamy, realtor William Gibson and hockey player Wayne Gretzky.
This tavern, with its nicotine sting and checkerboard floors, is the closest thing to home for an ex-junkie sheet metal worker like Christensen. And it, too, honours its famous patrons. A brass pot sits on a shelf behind the bar. It's dedicated to Hubert "Hubie" Rossum. "Hubie," says the engraving, "The Travelling Man," and below that, "The Final Journey 1998." It used to be a spittoon. Now it holds Hubie's ashes.
"He was a roofer," says Christensen, 54. "He was a fixture here. He died in Fort McMurray. Folks went in to wake him up one morning and he was dead from a heart attack. They brought his ashes back here. This was his home."
The names of a dozen or so other men and women are inscribed on plaques and funeral cards near the urn-oldtimers who lived at the hotel, drank at the tavern or did both. One day, Christensen will join that dusty honour roll. "The thing about this place is they remember you," he says. "Sometimes you come in here, it's full of ghosts."
Those ghosts and the whiff of oily denim and simple pleasures linger in smoky corners and hover over sticky bar tops in the kinds of places your mother told you not to go. Their tales, brimming with macho bluster, mind-numbing toil and aching loneliness, seep from stiff metal chairs and ringing cash registers. The spirits of stubborn immigrants and sly shysters float down dim hallways between thin doors and thinner carpets: men who paved our roads, built our houses, hauled ice, coal, logs and sold vacuum cleaners and tonics while others got wealthy selling real estate and cars. They collapsed wearily or drunkenly-sometimes both-into narrow beds at places like the Transit, the Hub, the Beverly Crest and the Jasper Place, temporary shelters which expected little and judged even less.
I spent a night at each of these hotels, bedding down next door to the invisible men who have so much to say and no one to say it to. I was an entertaining distraction for aging grandfathers. They were usually polite, flattered by the attention and exhilarated by the storytelling. They taught me about coal mining, Ukrainian sausage, war, camaraderie, courage, fistfighting, love, politics, hockey and dignity. More is known about the buildings, it seems, than the people who live inside. Yet they walk among us every day.
"No history of Alberta would be complete without registering the impact that young and adventurous itinerants had on the evolving culture of the prairies," R.W. Sandford wrote in 1995's Hotels, the History of Alberta's Hospitality . "
Uneducated immigrants, tradesmen, teamsters and railway labourers made progress westward possible. They did hard labour, clearing the land, building the railways, towns and factories. In their wake, a civility could gradually descend upon the West."
Room 230, Jasper Place Hotel, 15326 Stony Plain Road. Opened in 1952. Recently renovated-as are half the units-the room is spacious, clean and tastefully decorated. The old rooms are all occupied by regulars and long-timers. At night, the glowing neon "Hotel" sign outside my window bleeds fuschia through the vertical venetians. When all the lights are off, it looks the like the window to hell. Or an Amsterdam brothel. Outside, big snowflakes whitewash the roadside pawn shops and massage parlours like laundry powder.
The room is chilly, the sink backs up and the hot water is tepid at best, but the bed is firm and cable TV lulls me into desultory slumber. A hacking cough a few doors down is my wake-up call around 7:30 a.m.
Jim Crumb has been part owner and manager of the Jasper Place Hotel since 1995 when it was still The Klondiker. The owners resurrected the original name for the 50th anniversary in 2002, giving a nod to Jasper Place, the working-class neighbourhood west of 149th Street that, with a population of 39,000, was the biggest town in Canada before amalgamating with Edmonton in 1964. The re-christening was designed to flush away the old stain of bikers, brawls and drug dealing. But most of the regulars still call it The 'Diker. Stony Plain Road used to be chock-a-block with clothing shops, hardware stores and diners.
Now most stores hawk pawned merchandise, high-risk credit, low-cost furniture, sex, booze and vacant space. Crumb, 57, laments the neighbourhood decline but, like anyone who's invested more than $300,000 in renovations, he's hoping respectability is contagious.
Built by Louis Belland, the hotel has been a west-end axis for half a century. With a 400-seat live music nightclub downstairs and a 400-seat tavern on the main floor, The 'Diker was a rollicking, and often rowdy, social mecca. The basement club, which closed in the 1970s, is dark and silent now, full of furniture bought at auction, faded murals and peeling wallpaper. The "hen house" upstairs, which is where lady drinkers were once corralled, is now a lucrative VLT games room. After Alberta's eight-year polka with prohibition ended in 1924, women began complaining of harassment from men in bars.
The authorities solved the problem handily in 1928 by barring women from beverage rooms in Calgary and Edmonton unless owners built separate rooms for gals. They were segregated for 30 years until 1958 when women and escorts were allowed into those enclosed rooms. (Single men remained quarantined in a separate bar.) The walls came down for good in 1967 when women and men were loosed again to imbibe together unobstructed.
Bob Ruzycki remembers the absurdity of gender specific bars. He started sneaking into the Transit Hotel tavern when he was only 17, four years younger than the legal drinking age at the time. A thin wall down the middle separated the men from the women. Years later, while watching the moon landing on TV in the same tavern, he vowed he'd own the place one day.
On December 1, 1986, his wish came true. But now, when regulars buy him drinks, slap his ample back and profess devotion for the 96-year-old neighbourhood alma mater, his response is only partly in jest: "Wanna buy it?"
Room 17, Transit Hotel, 12720 Fort Road. Opened in 1908. Big room, high ceiling, scant furniture. The odour is a searing medley of stale smoke, bleach, car exhaust, air freshener and the glue they're using to affix new vinyl siding outside. I am directly above the dance floor where Whiskey Junction is cranking out hits from the eighties. The floor vibrates beneath ash gray carpet. A half-moon gouge in the wall looks like it was made with the bottom of a 26-ouncer. Across 66th Street-once a dirt trail along which farmers ran their pigs to slaughter-merchants cash cheques, sell aspirin and fix transmissions.
The next morning, an old man and I stand outside the bar that now doubles as a front desk. The doors don't open until 10 a.m. and I'm waiting for my key deposit. He's waiting for a fix.
Del Crowe always stays in Room 9 at the Transit when he's between roommates. "It's comfortable and it's a familiar place," says Crowe, 46 and a member of Piapot First Nation at Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan . "It's fairly safe. It's clean, sometimes." He slides videos from cardboard cases and proudly displays what his film training at Grant MacEwan College has produced. We watch several educational videos where he played cameraman, sound man or extra-films to teach kids about bullying and relationships. We smoke cigarettes in his tiny room near the stairs and share definitions of home and family, two cards rarely dealt to men who hit the road for work and adventure.
And so they stick to the hands they know and the dealers they can trust. As the Crowe flies, that's the Transit and Ruzycki. "I borrowed $100 from him one time and when I went to pay it back, he didn't remember it. I said, 'Thanks. It helped a lot.' He shrugged," Crowe says. "It's like a family here. It's like coming back home."
The Edmonton Bulletin gushed at the opening of Patrick Dwyer's Transit Hotel on September 12, 1908, noting that it had electricity, hot and cold running water, and a "telephone call system," all of which were remarkable for the time. The Transit was a popular stopping point in North Edmonton, known to locals as Packingtown because of the meat-packing industry which dominated the surrounding economy. North Edmonton officially became part of the city in 1913.
Trains came and went, Fort Trail became Fort Road and wagon ruts filled with pavement. Standing on the Transit's second-floor balcony amidst the choking fumes and rattle-whoosh of evening rush hour, it's tough to imagine the crowded suburbs as fields and farmland.
The son of teacher and later Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) MLA Stan Ruzycki, Bob Ruzycki is a big man with beefy forearms, football fists and a wavy white beard. Before becoming a hotelier nearly 20 years ago, he considered dozens of jobs-vacuum cleaner salesman, musician, sausage maker, cop, priest and funeral director-several of which he actually did. He laments unscrupulous contractors, self-serving politicians and overly zealous health inspectors. Keeping the old wooden structure upright and heated with a massive 93-year-old boiler is unequivocally complicated, expensive and agonizing. He sums it up this way: "A guy comes up with the money, boom-I'm gone."
Situated in the middle of Alberta and in the middle of the Prairies, Edmonton has always been a turnstile through which people have passed on their way west, north, south and, more recently, east. "A place that made so much sense in the fur trade continued to be a good location for the next 200 years," says Sheila McManus, history professor at the University of Lethbridge. "Pretty much from the beginning, Edmonton was a transient place. Even the fur trade was dependent on a mobile work force." Construction of the railroad, the Trans-Canada Highway and the Alaska Highway attracted men and families desperate for work in the first half of the 20th century. So did the Klondike gold rush, gas pipelines, oil rigs, rich soil and vast woodlands. From the 1870s onward, the federal government begged and bargained for western settlers and they came-from Poland, the Ukraine, the Netherlands, Serbia, Germany, Britain, the United States, the Maritimes, Ontario, Quebec and from dozens of First Nation reserves.
After arriving in town, they often made their way to a cheap hotel for a glass of beer, a plate of meatloaf and a bed. "They were places of local community gathering and celebration but places where visitors could come and find a network, people meeting people," says author and historian Lawrence Herzog. "That's what fascinates me about Edmonton hotel history, that sense of discovery, going some place new and finding a warm atmosphere. There was that sense of sharing, a deeper sharing where people made connections." They shared bathrooms, stories of home, union pamphlets, boots, guns and pitchers of ale. They exchanged more than a few punches too. These hotels were sanctuaries for working men and women-where their common class seemed to matter more than language, culture, age and uniform. But, with the advent of hotel chains and dance clubs, that sanctuary is quietly disappearing. "The ones still hanging on are a glimpse of what once was," says Herzog. "They're a snapshot in time and that's why they're so significant."
Room 44, Hub Hotel, 9692 Jasper Avenue. First built in 1882. I share a toilet down the hall with the men on my floor. They leave the seat up and seem bewildered by my presence. My window faces west into a brick wall. An old radiator hisses and clangs like a steam train. The ceilings are high and the door is old but secure. Dull murmurs from unseen televisions mingle in the hallway. As Mearl Boyer says, "It's got to do." The retired railwayman has a ship tattooed on his left forearm and a woman under a palm tree on his right. He's lived in Room 1 with his mini fridge and TV for nine years. I hesitate, as usual, before sliding into the nubby sheets. Such an intimate act in such a graceless place. I share this silent room with a thousand predecessors who make it feel eerily crowded. The morning greetings between long-time guests rouse me at 8 a.m. and I depart.
Downstairs in the lobby of the Hub, I meet Mike Kuchera whose Ukrainian mother was born on a ship bound for Canada a century ago. He's got a bad back courtesy of some long-past heavy lifting at the Canadian Chemical warehouse. After corrective surgery, he faced limited job prospects until a friend drove him to the Hub to meet owner Mike Jerwak. "He said, 'You're not working?' I said, 'No.' That day he put me behind the desk. That was 49 years ago."
In a half century of loyal duty to the Hub, Kuchera, still stout and sturdy at 71, gained a decent living but lost his right eye. He comes out from behind the counter to re-enact the fateful brawl of 1981, his robust Ukrainian accent underscoring the drama. A trio of teenagers had broken into the upstairs fire escape, he says, pointing skyward. Responding to a guest's alert, Kuchera raced up the stairs, grabbed the smallest one and dragged him downstairs while the other two struggled to free him. One man hit Kuchera just below his right eye with the end of a crutch. The two free men fled. Bloodied but determined, Kuchera kept hold of his prisoner with one colossal hand and called police with the other. The doctors couldn't save the eye. He pulls wire-rimmed glasses from the bridge of his nose to show me his impressive eye implant. He shrugs and retreats behind the old wooden cash register with the same stern expression. "A job is a job," he says.
Natalie Jerwak and her sister Stella Worley inherited the Hub from their father. Built in 1882 as Jasper House, it was Edmonton's first brick building and the first between Winnipeg and Vancouver. The stagecoach to Calgary stopped out front every Monday morning and charged $25 each way. Aside from portions of the south wall, very little of that first brick building remains due to extensive renovations. The hotel was renamed the Empress in 1920 before becoming the Hub in 1940. Mike Jerwak bought it in 1945 for $49,750 and ran it until he died in 1968, the night after receiving an award from the city for keeping the hotel free of crime or disturbance. He died in his sleep, proud and peaceful, with a Reader's Digest on his chest. He was 72.
The daughters have gathered friends in the tavern to talk about the days before Hub karaoke, when draught beer was 10 cents a glass and women wore gloves indoors. Bill Kuchera, Mike's cousin, was once part-owner and later manager of the Hub. His grandfather, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, worked at the coal mine in Frank and was thankfully absent the night the Turtle Mountain avalanche buried the town and killed more than 70 people. Norman Nairn, Bill's long-time assistant at the hotel, wears a navy Royal Canadian Legion blazer and sits with his wife Marie, who has worked at the Hub since 1980.
"After the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, lots of Hungarians came here," says Kuchera. "The front section here, we called it the Hungarian Embassy. I'd help them with their immigration papers and getting work. A lot of them didn't speak English. We had a Ukrainian area too. Slavs. Sometimes tensions flared up over politics."
The Hub attracted union men, they said, off-duty police officers, wayfarers and new Canadians. When women and escorts were allowed to drink together, Mike Jerwak built the Hawaiian Lounge-the VLT side today-and filled it with flowery coasters, backlit pictures of the islands and fruity drinks.
Around supper time, Pat Warner and Paul Holdsworth sit at the bar and trade jokes with Hub bartender Scott Plummer. Warner has been staying in Room 10 for nearly a year. Holdsworth is an off-and-on Hub guest. Plummer passes around peanut butter cookies dropped off that morning by an elderly man named Arthur who lives in the neighbourhood. Arthur visits the tavern every morning for a coffee or a mug of clamato juice and always leaves behind a bag of homemade cookies for staff and patrons.
"Everybody looks out for each other. You see an older person here who's being hassled, you get up and tell them to leave him alone. And the staff look out for you too. It's a community. It's a family," says Warner.
"It's a working man's bar," says Holdsworth.
"Yes, that's exactly it," says Warner. "It's working class."
Room 221, Jockey Motel, 3604-118th Avenue. Built in 1969. The Jockey and the Starland Motel are now owned by the neighbouring Beverly Crest Hotel. Home for decades to visiting jockeys and rodeo folk, it is a large, clean room with a kitchenette and a wide window facing 118th Avenue. I read Gideon's Bible between sips of discount beer from the Beverly Crest Liquor Mart then stare across the street at Value Cemetery Monuments whose assurance, "From Factory to You!" brings little comfort. The Goodwill store to the east sells pristine fur coats for $50.
The 118 Super Food Store to the west sells hash pipes and porn. A lustrous half moon in the eastern sky presides over the truck-clogged hotel parking lot. I fall asleep to the metronomic swish-swish-swish of traffic and the words of the prophets. I awake disoriented at 8 a.m.
Lorraine Trudeau used to wear rubber boots when she took the Sunbird bus line from Beverly to downtown Edmonton. At the bus station, she'd put her muddy rubbers in a locker, don a pair of respectable footwear, go shopping, and then put her boots back on for home. "You had to," she says. "It was a mudhole. There were no streets and no sidewalks." That was Beverly's charm, of course. No services meant affordable housing.
Trudeau has worked 26 years for the Beverly Crest since it opened in 1961 though not all consecutive. She only works part-time now. She is, after all, 72 and must contend with the debilitating pins holding together a left knee that a tidal wave tried to tear apart 18 years ago on a beach in the Philippines.
Beverly was a village with bakeries, grocers, hardware stores and a strong sense of pride before it was amalgamated in 1961. The rich coal seams beneath the town attracted families from all over Canada and beyond when mines like the Humberstone and the Beverly were up and running. The hotel was always full of tradesmen-insulators, pipefitters, construction workers and welders, Trudeau says, along with travelling salesmen and horse track people. In the 1980s, like many hotels hard-pressed to cover mortgages and taxes, the Crest added something sweet to the menu: strippers.
Manager Ernie Mekechuk, part-owner back then, isn't proud of those years but says it brought in much-needed revenue during a bad slump. For 10 years, Mekechuk struggled to limit the strippers' exposure to respectable guests by asking the ladies to dress conservatively in the lobby and check out either before or after other guests. They rarely complied. Trudeau laughs when she thinks of those years.
"We'd get the old farts sitting in the lobby. They knew exactly when the strippers came through. Then the church people came in here on Sunday and you'd have these Jezebels checking out at the front counter. What a confrontation. The kids would be, like 'Mom! What's that?'" she says. "Oh, it was a lot more adventurous back then." Now, under the Travelodge franchise, the Crest is completely renovated and caters to a more affluent crowd. But a lot of oldtimers still consider the Crest Roadhouse their neighbourhood tavern.
Mike Miserva, 96, and Nick Szatylo, 77, share a pony pitcher of draught at the roadhouse on a Friday afternoon. Miserva helped pave 118th Avenue eastward from 50th Street in 1959 and 1960. He was a Beverly resident long before it had electricity and, at one time, made money delivering coal. "A ton to each house," he says, with a moist, garbled voice. Miserva the elder is a regular at the tavern and sometimes, according to Trudeau, even gets up to dance. After he leaves, Szatylo talks about his years in the military, the death of his wife, Brigitte, and how Beverly used to be a safe place for old people. He doesn't think so anymore.
Before the Crest's back bar was turned into a VLT games room, there used to be a long table where all the old regulars sat to tell lies. It was affectionately known as "death row." Most of those regulars are deceased now, including John Panchuk. "Pancho" was an insulator.
An honourable gentleman, says Trudeau. She should know. He ate and drank at the Crest nearly every day for decades. After he died six years ago, Peter Panchuk got permission from Mekechuk to fulfill his brother's dying wish. In a brief and solemn ceremony, Peter and his son sprinkled some of Pancho's ashes behind the Crest on a little island of grass and spruce trees north of the wide, asphalt parking lot. "It's what he wanted," Peter Panchuk says about his brother, a member of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers, otherwise known as the Insulators Union. "If you're going to put anything in there about him, be sure to mention Local 110."
None of the rooms I stayed in had clocks. They are, fittingly, without time. They are places people run to. Or from. They are reluctant stopovers or destinations in themselves. They are noisy, drafty, hot and lonely. They are humbling, dingy, faded and worn. In the middle of the night they are silent and, during the day, abuzz. They smell of sweat and travel. All things crude and simple. And past.
