Then & Now: The Arlington Hotel

Here is another photo from a series of negatives I recently purchased showing Trail in 1953. Pictured is the intersection of Bay and Spokane streets, with the Arlington Hotel on the right. If we didn’t otherwise know the date, we’d be able to tell based on the license plate on one of the parked cars.

Here is the view today from the same spot.

The chief differences are the top two storeys have been lopped off the Arlington (more on that below), exposing the West Kootenay Power building in behind, and a couple of trees have grown up where there were none before.

The Arlington was built in 1896 by R.T. Daniel, making it one of the oldest buildings in Trail. Daniel was not in Trail long, but is remembered in both the Arlington and in Daniel Street. He was later a leading citizen in Tulsa, where he built the much larger Hotel Tulsa in 1912.

ca. 1890s, not long after the hotel was built. Jacob Lukov had a dry goods store on the ground floor.

Although it was stuccoed over in 1926 and lost its cupola in the 1940s, the Arlington retained many heritage characteristics well into the 1980s.

ca. late 1970s or early 1980s. (Al Peterson photo)

ca. mid-1980s. The paint scheme has been reversed from the top photo, which shows the bottom floor brown and the upper storeys white. (Greg Nesteroff collection)

Alas, the hotel lost its two upper floors as part of a three-month renovation that began in April 1987. As Nancy Rode wrote in the Trail Times on Sept. 27, 1996 when the hotel celebrated its centennial:

Current owner Doreen Stanley-Clarke said she was forced to remove the top floors after she was refused heritage funding. “It was 1988 [sic] and there was a strike going on in town at that time, and I had no choice.”

The story did not say which agency refused the funding or exactly what the goal was of removing the floors (to reduce heating costs?). The strike actually began in May 1987, after the hotel renovation had started, and it lasted until September. In any case, the hotel looked like this afterward, with a sort of mock Tudor design:

The Arlington ca. 1988 (Greg Nesteroff collection)

The Arlington in October 2000.

The Arlington in March 2011.

Updated on May 3, 2021 to add the later photos and additional info on when the top storeys were lopped off. Updated on Sept. 18, 2026 to pinpoint when the top storeys were lopped off.