The Watch
LATITUDE
HYATT HOTEL IN THE PIPELINE FOR OLD ENBRIDGE BUILDING It’s a familiar sight to Edmonton drivers and other downtown denizens: an office building with a peaked roof at the corner of 102nd Street and Jasper Avenue. The former Enbridge building, a city landmark since opening its doors in 1981, is on its way to becoming a business centre and a stopping-off point for visitors to the city. Most recently, the tower housed about 2,000 Enbridge employees—many of them professionals licensed with APEGA. But in 2016, the permit-holding company relocated to the new Enbridge Centre, a shiny, 28-storey tower built where the Kelly Ramsey Building once stood. The 38-year-old former Enbridge home is being transformed into a palace of beds and boardrooms. The business hotel, under the Hyatt brand, will include 300 guest rooms, a wellness spa, a fitness area, and much more. Owned by Lighthouse Hospitality Inc., it will offer short-term stays through Hyatt Place and long-term stays through Hyatt House. Naturally, the building’s exterior will also be redeveloped to suit its new purposes, but the iconic peaked roof will survive the $65-to-$70 million revamp. Owners say that the project should take about 18 months to complete. The Raymond Block opened this January after five years of construction. Named for the Raymond Hotel, which occupied the site in the early 1900s, it boasts 95 luxury apartments on its top four floors, and retail and office space on its lower two. In the lobby you’ll find a 50-foot wall containing century- old bricks reclaimed from the historic and now demolished Kelly Ramsey building in downtown Edmonton. The Ramsey caught fire in 2009, and the lot where it stood is now home to Enbridge Centre. According to the Government of Alberta’s major projects inventory, the estimated cost of the Raymond Block was $45 million.
STILL MAKING A POINT The old Enbridge building in downtown Edmonton will be home to a new Hyatt-branded hotel, expected to be complete in about 18 months. -artist’s rendering courtesy Lighthouse Hospitality
HEALING IS COMPLETE OF A WHYTE AVENUE EYESORE For 20 years in Edmonton, an empty lot at the southeast corner of 105 Street was an ugly gap in Whyte Avenue’s otherwise inviting smile. Filled with weeds and mud puddles, and cordoned off by chain-link fencing, the site had been home to a gas station that closed way back in 1998.
Wherever underground gas tanks are used, so-called brownfields are the result, meaning environmental remediation was required before the lot was fit for reuse. Eventually, Calgary’s Wexford Developments was cleared to begin work on a 132,000-square-foot, mixed-use building at the Edmonton site.
SPRING 2019 PEG | 57
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