The original timber Queen's had stood at the Wickham Street corner since 1872 and had been extended along the street in the 1880s, but by 1899 its new owner, John Henry Tyack, decided wood was beneath it. He raised a fourteen-thousand-pound mortgage on the property and ran a competition for a brick replacement fit for a city that fancied itself the capital of the north. The Townsville architectural firm of Eaton, Bates and Polin won the commission, and the building rose in stages between 1902 and the mid-1920s, the later additions costing some forty thousand pounds more. The result was deliberately ostentatious. The Strand frontage borrowed from Art Nouveau and from the verandahed colonial architecture of British India, with arched ground-floor arcades, decorative rendered panels, wide sheltering eaves, and those distinctive paired towers crowned by cupolas. It was a building designed to impress travellers stepping off the steamers, and it did.

Townsville in the early 1900s was booming on the back of gold, cattle, and sugar, and it wanted a hotel to match its ambitions. The Queen's delivered. Inside, a carved cedar staircase with a twin return rose beneath a glazed skylight and plaster mouldings dripping with laurel-leaf relief. There was a Palm Lounge and a dining room reached through doors of etched glass. Dignitaries stayed here; an Australian Governor-General was entertained nearby; the hotel was the social pivot of the city's seafront. Surviving fragments of marble flooring and joinery still hint at the scale of the thing, a confident statement in render and English-bond brick that North Queensland had arrived.

Then came the war that transformed Townsville from regional port to Allied stronghold. From 1942 the city filled with tens of thousands of Australian and American servicemen bound for the fighting in New Guinea, and the Queen's was requisitioned for the duration. American forces took it over as an officers' billet and ran it as a US Army officers' mess. For a few years the elegant verandahs that had hosted graziers and gold-rush money instead sheltered young officers a very long way from home, many of them passing through on their way north to the islands, where some would not return from. The hotel's marble lounges and shaded balconies offered a few hours of comfort between the troopships and the war. The grand building on The Strand became, briefly, a small fixture of a global conflict, its peacetime glamour bent to wartime purpose.

The Queen's never quite returned to its old life. It changed hands after the war, and in 1977 the broadcaster Telecasters North Queensland acquired it, restored the exterior, and gutted the interior into television and radio studios and offices. The former Palm Lounge became a telecine room; bedrooms were knocked together into open-plan workspace. Parts of the building were demolished, the brickwork was sandblasted back to bare red, and steel stanchions were bolted on to tie the roof down against the cyclones that periodically batter the coast. It is a strange afterlife for a luxury hotel, yet it kept the landmark standing. Heritage-listed in 1992, the Queen's remains the most theatrical building on The Strand, its turrets still presiding over the seafront a century after they first caught the eye.