With the expansion of Street View coverage in Canada, we can continue our exploration (see parts one & two) of historic Grand Railway Hotels.

Travelling again from east to west, we begin in Winnipeg, location of the magnificent Fort Garry Hotel.

Constructed in 1913¹ in the now familiar Chateau style, it was the tallest building in the city at the time. The hotel was named after the nearby Upper Fort Garry, which was a prominent trading post in the 1800s.

The hotel was, for a while, totally self-sufficient – with heat, food, water and laundry all being taken care of on-site. There was even a working printing press, which was lifted into place before a room was constructed around it (it’s still there but currently unused). Unlike the majority of railway hotels which are today owned by Fairmont, the Fort Garry is independently operated.

Another non-Fairmont hotel is in Saskatoon, The Bessborough.

Named after the then-Governor General, the Bess was built in 1932 but the great depression meant it didn’t receive its first guest until 3 years later. This hotel is noted for its extensive private gardens which stretch down towards the South Saskatchewan River.

Following the route of The Canadian to the west, we get to Edmonton and the Hotel Macdonald, which brings us back into the Fairmont properties.

Named for Canada’s first prime minister, The Mac was constructed in 1915 in the Chateau style, though the use of Indiana limestone gives it a different appearance to many of the other hotels. This hotel was in poor condition and closed for a while in the 1980s. Heritage designation from the city saved it from demolition, and it reopened in 1991 after a major renovation.

Finally, we go beyond the reach of the railway, to Victoria and the unmistakable ivy-covered walls of The Empress, which opened in 1908 to serve passengers from Canadian Pacific’s steamships.

Perhaps most famous for its afternoon teas, The Empress has a storied history of Royal and celebrity visitors. Similar to The Mac, a period of decline almost saw its destruction, but local sentiment was strong enough to save the building. That same civic pride forced Fairmont to abandon plans to alter the iconic sign on the hotel’s exterior.

There are many more railway hotels across Canada, but this concludes our look at the majority of the grandest and most historic properties.

Far out in the Atlantic Ocean, the easternmost point of North America is Cape Spear, a few kilometres south-east of St John’s in Newfoundland.

A scenic drive through moorland and stunning coastal scenery brings visitors to the Cape Spear parking lot, from where footpaths lead to historic sites and cliffs – the latter being somewhat dangerous due to high winds and waves.

Near to the most easterly point of the continent, bunkers and a pair of rusting 25cm guns are stark reminders of WWII, when this was a key location for the defence of St John’s harbour.

A short distance away stand a pair of lighthouses. The southern structure is the original, and dates to the 1830s. Over the years oil and gas were both used to light its warning lamp, but it was eventually converted to electricity almost 100 years after it was built. It was replaced by the new automated lighthouse in 1955, but the original building today serves as a museum, as it’s the oldest surviving lighthouse in Newfoundland.

Ah, New York City… it can easily be thought of as one of the busiest, most congested places on the planet. Its miles and miles of blacktop are usually covered with thousands of people shuffling furiously from one place to the next. On GSS’s last visit, we came across this poor kid who seemed to buckle under the pressure!

However, nestled deep inside New York’s concrete canyons you can still find a few places that take you back to the past. These buildings were built in a simpler time when things weren’t quite as hectic, and yet they survived as the big city grew up around them.

The oldest building in New York City is the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House. It’s believed to have been built in 1652. Today it sits in Milton Fidler Park, right between a junkyard and a McDonald’s!

Our next stop is the John Bowne House located in Queens. It was built around 1661 and was the site of a Quaker meeting in 1662¹. The Bowne family lived in the house until 1945, when they turned it over to the Bowne Historical Society². Today, the building sits right under the approach path for busy LaGuardia airport, which is less than 2 miles to the west.

The Frederick Van Cortlandt House in the Bronx was built in 1748. The family used the land around the house to establish a grain plantation. The house was also used during the American Revolutionary War. Today, the land has been preserved and converted to a public park, and the house has been a museum since 1897.

Right across the street from Ground Zero sits St. Paul’s Chapel. The chapel was built in 1766 and is the oldest surviving church building in the city of New York³. While recovery efforts were underway after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the chapel served as a place of rest and refuge for recovery workers.

Finally, to give you an idea of how much times have changed over the years, we visit the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum. It was completed in 1799 and was built as a means of “escape” from busy city life. At the time New York City only extended down to 14th street, so this location was actually considered “out in the country” for the city’s residents. Over time, the city grew and the building became a museum in 1933 1939. Today the building sits in New York’s Lenox Hill community, right down the street from the south end of Central Park.

Check Wikipedia for more information about these structures and a full list of the oldest buildings in New York City.

Thanks to Terri.

Belfast is well known for its many murals representing differing political and religious views of the city’s communities.

However in recent years, thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, there has been a move away from the political murals to more community-based murals, and in this post we shall deal with murals relating to sport; industrial heritage; and the arts within the city.

Sports

There are many sporting heroes of Belfast, probably the most popular of all being George Best: without doubt Northern Ireland’s greatest football player.

There are many other murals to the NI international football team, including one in honour to a famous victory over England.

There are also murals to local football clubs Glentoran FC and Linfield FC.

Gaelic games are more favoured in Nationalist areas, with murals to Ard Eoin Kickhams GAA club and to Liam McCarthy.

There are 2 murals to other local sporting heroes, Snooker player Alex Higgins and Kickboxer Gary Hamilton.

INDUSTRY

Belfast is also very well known for its industrial past. RMS Titanic was constructed in the Harland and Wolff dockyards.

Historically, Belfast has been a centre for the Irish linen industry (earning the nickname “Linenopolis”) and Short Brothers (now Bombardier) also manufacture aircraft in the city.

ARTS

CS Lewis, author of the Narnia books, was born in Belfast in 1898 and like any son of Belfast he also has a mural or two. There is also a mural to traditional Irish music and a nod to Picasso’s Guernica.

And, to finish off, there is always someone with a sense of humour: “Santa is a British Agent” and “TV Licence Men Beware”.

There are many more murals, visit murals of Belfast to find some of them.

Using the heat from the Earth’s interior to generate electricity is known as the creation of geothermal power, and in the examples featuring 2000-metre boreholes, it’s correctly believed to be a fairly recent development. In some places however, the energy from the hot parts of the Earth’s inner layers can be harvested with little more than a spade.

The area around Larderello¹ in Tuscany’s Cecina valley has an abundance of hot wells (lagoni) and natural steam fountains (sofioni), where the escaping steam leaves the ground under very high pressure at temperatures of over 200°C; making it ideal for power generation.

The gases released here also smell strongly of sulphur, which is why this is known as Valle del Diavolo – “The Devil’s Valley”.

A working geothermal generator (using a steam-powered piston engine) was demonstrated² here as early as 1904, and Larderello actually became the location of the world’s first geothermal power plant all the way back in 1913! Today, over one third of the electricity consumed in Tuscany is produced by local geothermal plants.

The whole countryside around the town is criss-crossed by large insulated pipelines transporting superheated steam from the wells to the power station.

In 2005, nearly 10% of the world’s geothermal electricity was produced in Larderello, but as more, high-tech geothermal power stations have been built around the world, this proportion has shrunk dramatically.

You can take a guided tour if you’re in the area, of which one of the highlights is a steam outlet that the tour guide opens with a remote control to create a deafeningly loud, and very impressive-looking column of steam:

You can read more about Geothermal power at Wikipedia.