Buildings that weren’t: Hume Motor Inn

In early 1962, plans were unveiled for an “ultra-modern” three-storey addition to Nelson’s Hume Hotel, to be built adjacent to the existing hotel on the southwest, but set back from Vernon Street.

Owner Terry Maber said the new building would have 45 rooms, a swimming pool (glassed in and visible from the street), a 500-seat banquet hall, and underground parking for 100 cars. Plus there would be four storefronts on the ground floor, one of which was apparently already spoken for (the concept sketch showed a real estate and insurance office). The project cost was pegged at $250,000, the equivalent of $2.6 million in 2025. It was expected to take from three to 10 years to complete.

A concept sketch of the Hume Hotel expansion in the Kootenay Graphic News, Feb. 1, 1962. Note the ramp to underground parking at right and the glassed-in swimming pool at centre.

Maber explained the project was partly in response to the rumoured $1 million development of Ainsworth Hot Springs and to southeast interior highway projects (presumably including the completion of the Kootenay Pass). It also hinged on development of the Silver King ski hill.

There was, however, a major hold-up: while part of the expansion was planned for the hotel’s parking lot, the rest was to go on two lots of city-owned parkland, whose future had long been in doubt.

“The small park … is presently unused except by strollers and has little shade,” the Nelson Daily News wrote. “The park is also zoned in the middle of commercial property.”

The park had lawn and flower beds but a concrete bandstand that once stood on the site had been demolished a few years earlier. Reportedly in 1956, the city had offered the lots to the hotel for $3,000 but was turned down. Now, Maber asked city council to change the zoning and sell him the land as cheaply as possible. However, he ran into some stiff opposition.

Alderman Boyd Affleck, described by the Daily News as “the park’s Gibraltar,” was adamant there would be no sale. “Our parks are as scarce as hen’s teeth,” he said. “We have been going around moaning about the lack of parks in our downtown.”

The Royal Canadian Legion was also against it, because at the time the cenotaph stood on a boulevard across from the park.

But mayor Tom Shorthouse said no one seemed to use the park much, and alderman J.S.M. Harts didn’t even think it was worth calling a park. “It’s a nice garden,” he said. “Two lots do not make a park.”

Maber thought the cenotaph could be moved elsewhere, perhaps to the courthouse lawn. Rather than make a decision, council appointed a committee to meet with the Legion.

Maber came back a few weeks later with a revised proposal: he offered $2,350 for a strip of the park to build a two-storey parking garage. Council said it would hold a referendum on the matter at the end of the year.

Maber came back again, with another proposal: this time, if the city sold him the property for $1, he would build a 40-car garage on the site and lease it to the city for $1 per year for 10 or 20 years. Council asked him to put it in writing.

After that, I could find nothing further on the subject of the hotel expansion but of course it didn’t happen. The city ultimately built its own multi-storey parkade on the former park site in 1972, which was useful, though painfully ugly. (It didn’t have to be that way: a parkade built in Spokane a few years earlier is now on the city’s register of historic properties.) Boyd Affleck, who died in 1969, must have been turning in his grave.

Around the same time the parkade opened or shortly thereafter, the cenotaph was moved to the courtyard of the provincial government building, now city hall. In the mid-2000s, the Hume Hotel expanded modestly on the rear of its parking lot, where a new kitchen was built.