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After site contamination and permit troubles slowed construction for months, the doors have finally swung open on a new Downtown Edmonton hotel. The 13-storey Hyatt Place on Jasper Avenue in The Quarters welcomed its first guests last week, four years after the ground was broken on the Dub Architects-designed building.
The hotel's 255 guestrooms are augmented by a suite of amenities, including a 24-hour StayFit Gym with touchscreen-equipped cardio equipment, a 450-square-foot hot tub, and 11,000 square feet of meeting and events space. There are 200 spaces in the heated underground parking garage, allowing guests to safely secure their car while out seeing nearby sites like the Shaw Conference Centre, Citadel Theatre, Sir Winston Churchill Square, and Winspear Centre.
The development is the first Hyatt Place to open in Canada, a brand that offers "casual hospitality in a smartly designed, high-tech and modern environment", according to the Hyatt website. It's also opening just weeks ahead of Canada's second Hyatt Place, a seven-storey building at 18004 100 Avenue NW in suburban Edmonton.
The hotel's diagonal exterior folds and Jasper frontage tilt towards the river valley. A large lot to the south will also potentially host another hotel, if Alldritt's planned 80-storey tower receives approvals. The Quarters has been groomed to become a mixed-use urban village, giving the area a refreshed identity that would shed the social and economic stigma that thrives off its high rate of property crime and low household incomes. Although the transformation has been relatively slow, piecemeal and wholesale urban developments have the power to change perceptions and boost neighbourhood morale.
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