Ford Hotel, former hotel site in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
The Ford Hotel was a building with three connected wings, each rising about 12 stories high and featuring a ground floor with a lobby and dining facilities. The structure offered approximately 750 rooms for travelers.
The building was constructed in 1928 and operated as a hotel for 45 years before its demolition in 1973. The site was then redeveloped with the Atrium on Bay complex.
The Toronto Star called the Ford Hotel the "rendezvous of choice for couples pursuing an illicit affair." The 750-room hotel, next to the Toronto Bus Terminal, was known as a site for crime and vice while renting cheap rooms to lower-income travellers.
The hotel stood on the north side of Dundas Street West, east of Bay Street, next to the Toronto Bus Terminal. The building is gone: it was demolished in 1973, and the site now holds the Atrium on Bay, known simply as Atrium.
All five R.T. Ford & Company hotels were designed by Rochester architect John Foster Warner (1859–1937). The Toronto building was identical to the Ford hotels in Buffalo and Montreal, each with 750 rooms; the Buffalo one, built in 1922 at 210-214 Delaware Avenue, was demolished in 1999, and the Montreal one, opened in 1930, housed CBC-Radio-Canada headquarters from 1936 to the early 1970s.
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