Decline
In 1957, another fire destroyed a third of the hotel. This time the damage was extensive, and the original hotel structure had to be demolished. The cupola, weighing some 15 tons, came down on August 12, 1959. Within the next five years, the Tour CIBC office tower was constructed on the site of the original hotel.
The North Annex was all that remained of the Windsor Hotel, but it did contain 200 guest rooms, two ballrooms and Peacock Alley. The Windsor Hotel continued to operate out of the North Annex for almost another 25 years, but competition from newer hotels lead to the Windsor's slow decline. In 1975, Dolores Costello returned to the hotel for her seventieth birthday party, in honour of the hotel that had been her second home decades earlier. This party was perhaps the last true glimpse of the hotel's former grandeur before the Windsor's closure in 1981.
Read more about this topic: Windsor Hotel (Montreal)
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness, they rise with beauty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)