…the Janion Hotel(?)

The Janion (Hotel) is definitely a landmark here in Victoria, especially among locals. Everyone knows the Janion, but I wonder how many know about its history. The Janion was indeed a hotel, built in 1891. But it wasn’t a hotel for long. In fact, “The hotel lacked a liquor licence, limiting prospects in rough-and-tumble Victoria, and shut down less than a year after the first guest checked in.” (http://carlykb.com/gateway/?p=924, and I’ve read this elsewhere in the past).

Since then, the building has been used for many things, including “the business office of the E & N Railway, a warehouse for B. Wilson & Co. Storage, a cold storage facility for the B.C. Cold Storage, Ice and Produce Company, and the facility for Lake of the Woods Milling Company” (http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=6057) You can read more about its history in a Times Colonist article from 2008: http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/story.html?id=f8c19f43-f3d0-4645-bbd5-742f6c54e101l

The Janion was abandoned sometime in the 1960s or 1970s and has been standing vacant and boarded up ever since. In 1995, just as the owners at the time were trying to get a demolition permit to get rid of the building, the Janion was granted status as a Historic Place in Canada. And recently (and finally!) it was bought by a developer who is going to convert it to downtown living. Micro-condos and commercial, as is the trend out here these days. It is scheduled to be completed sometime in 2016, I believe.

Some of my drive-by pics…

And here is one taken by someone else, but that I thought was a better view of the whole place than I managed to get (because I was lazy…)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Janion_Hotel,_Victoria,_B.C..jpg
By Mlon1971 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Interesting Websites

• The Janion at Historic Places: http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=6057
• Times Colonist article: http://www.timescolonist.com/business/a-glimpse-inside-the-old-janion-hotel-building-1.341845
• The Janion 1891: http://www.quintinwinks.com/2011/02/janion-1891.html
• The Janion at Island Images blog (great photos here): http://carlykb.com/gateway/?p=924
• You can get a glimpse of the future here at Janion 2013: http://www.janion2013.com/
• Victoria’s historic Janion building will once again be ‘a hive … of people’: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/victorias-historic-janion-building-will-once-again-be-a-hive-of-people/article4299533/