Montreal architects George Ross and David MacFarlane designed the Fort Garry after the model of Ottawa's Chateau Laurier, making it Manitoba's only example of the chateauesque architectural style that defined Canada's grand railway hotels. The exterior combines the romantic silhouette of a Loire Valley chateau -- truncated hip roof, multiple peaks, progressively smaller dormer windows, pinnacles, and ornate chimneys -- with the monolithic form of a twentieth-century skyscraper. Smooth-cut Indiana limestone rises over a grey granite base. The copper roofs, now aged to a green patina, cap the structure with a profile that remains unmistakable against the flat horizon. Inside, the hotel offered luxury that matched its exterior promise, catering to the wealthy travellers who crossed the continent on the Grand Trunk Pacific and expected to find civilization waiting at every stop.

The Fort Garry's first century was not kind. On December 7, 1971, at 1:30 in the morning, fire broke out on the seventh floor and damaged the top ten storeys. Fifty firefighters battled the blaze for two hours while 95 guests were evacuated; remarkably, only one man was hospitalized. The first three floors remained open even as smoke cleared above. By 1987, the hotel owed a staggering sum in back taxes and was described as being in 'urgent need of renovations to bring it up to modern-day standards.' The City of Winnipeg briefly owned the building before selling it in early 1988 to a company controlled by Quebec hotelier Raymond Malenfant -- for just one million dollars, with a promise of twelve million more in renovations. The deal signaled how far the once-grand hotel had fallen, and how uncertain its future remained.

No account of the Fort Garry is complete without Room 202, the hotel's most famous -- and most fictional -- resident. The story goes that a woman, upon hearing of her husband's death in a car accident, hanged herself in the closet of the room many years ago. The tale has made the Fort Garry a staple of Canadian haunted-hotel lists. There is, however, no documentation to support it. No newspaper articles report a woman's death in the hotel, and the story itself has shifted over the decades, originally involving a man found dead before transforming into the more dramatic suicide narrative. The ghost may be pure invention, but the legend has proven remarkably durable -- and remarkably good for business.

Before the fire and the ghost stories, the Fort Garry played a quieter but historically significant role in Canadian broadcasting. Between 1923 and 1932, the hotel housed the Winnipeg studio of CNR Radio, the precursor to CBC Radio. Using the original CKY transmitter on 665 kHz -- later moving to 780 kHz in 1925 -- the Canadian National Railway purchased airtime on stations it did not own, so-called 'phantom' stations, broadcasting from a hotel room to listeners across the prairies. It was an early experiment in national public broadcasting, born in the same building that had been built to move people by rail. Designated a National Historic Site in 1981 and a Manitoba Provincial Heritage Site in 1990, the Fort Garry stands today as the only surviving grand railway hotel in Winnipeg -- a copper-roofed reminder that this prairie city once sat at the crossroads of a continent.