Van Horne Mansion

Van Horne Mansion
French: Maison Van Horne
The Van Horne Mansion, c. 1890
General information
Type	Private house
Location	Golden Square Mile
Address	Sherbrooke Street, Montreal, Quebec
Construction started	1869
Demolished	1973
Landlord	John Hamilton Sir William Van Horne
Design and construction
Architect	J. W. Hopkins

The Van Horne Mansion (French: Maison Van Horne) was a classic greystone house on Sherbrooke Street at the corner of Stanley Street in Montreal's Golden Square Mile. It was built in 1869 for John Hamilton, President of the Merchant's Bank of Montreal. In 1889, Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, President of the Canadian Pacific Railway, purchased the property and it remained in his family until it was controversially demolished in 1973. Despite the public outcry over its proposed destruction, Mayor Jean Drapeau declared that it could not be preserved for cultural reasons as it was not part of Quebec's culture, its history being Anglo Canadian, not French Canadian. With Drapeau's support, it was bulldozed in the middle of the night by developer David Azrieli, who replaced it with a concrete tower block.

Van Horne hired Bruce Price's architectural firm, who had done much of the work for the Canadian Pacific Railway, to enlarge the old Hamilton house to fifty-two rooms.

It was Edward Colonna (died 1948), an architect who had previously worked for Louis Comfort Tiffany before being hired by Price, who carried out the alterations to the Van Horne house. Colonna redid the entire ground floor and possibly much of the first floor, creating a spacious area with well-proportioned rooms and plenty of wall-space for Van Horne's art collection. The interior of Van Horne's house, from its fireplaces, ceilings and gold leaf walls, was the first example of art nouveau in Canada. Van Horne claimed to like homes "big and bulky like myself", but he had one of the best private art and pottery collections in North America and wanted a house he could share with it. The building was damaged by a fire on Monday, April 3, 1933, which led to the loss of part of Van Horne's private art collection.