Jasper Place Hotel destruction both loss of history, new opportunity, say west-enders

A building that's been abandoned for years caught fire Thursday morning, raising questions as to why it was never demolished.

Longtime west-end Edmontonians remember when Stony Plain Road was a lively thoroughfare.

“It’s not the same Jasper Place that I grew up in, of course,” said Irma Belton, whose parents moved to Jasper Place in 1958 and who has lived for the last 35 years in the neighbourhood, in a recent interview with CTV News Edmonton.

Edmonton annexed 149 Street to 170 Street in 1964. Belton remembers when wooden sidewalks marked the end of the capital city’s limits.

But the changes she’s observed are more than just expansion outward.

“I can remember a lot of things, but when I drive by certain things, it’s gone. What happened to that building?”

In the case of the former Jasper Place Hotel at 153 Street: a fire early Friday morning.

Belton remembers the venue, opened in 1952, as a community watering hole, loud with dime-fed jukebox music and bar fights, and which required women to be escorted by a man.

Thursday’s firefight lasted 16 hours. Several sections of the building collapsed in the process, prompting its demolition on Saturday for safety reasons. The damage caused by the fire is an estimated $1.4 million.

Belton was unsurprised to learn the hotel’s fate.

Although the cause of the blaze has not yet been determined, it had been vacant since a fire in 2019, and many of Edmonton’s empty buildings become scenes of fires.

Belton wishes the building could have been turned into a landmark for west Edmonton.

“They spend money on other things. Why wouldn’t they preserve something like that? It’s history,” she said.

The Community Property Safety Team (CPST), one prong of Edmonton’s plan to tackle derelict properties, says it had been monitoring the building, as is protocol after a property is secured by its order. The CPST ordered the owner to secure the property on Oct. 30, 2025; they did so on Nov. 18, avoiding further enforcement.

“(The fire) sheds light that there’s a few properties, specifically from 149 (Street) to 156 (Street) that are a problem. They’re abandoned, need to be looked at, and need to be helped on how they can be redeveloped,” Ward Nakota Isga Coun. Reed Clarke told CTV News Edmonton.

Among his priorities for the year is revitalizing the Stony Plain Road corridor to support the incoming LRT.

And while he supports fellow councillor Ashley Salvador’s push to see more derelict properties across the city taxed at a higher rate, including commercial and industrial properties, Clarke is excited about the opportunity along Stony Plain Road.

“This isn’t great that there was a fire and then this development burnt down, but it does allow to have the conversation of what happens next,” he pointed out.

He envisions a mix of commercial and residential development.

“My approach is if you can start to get one, two or three spots, and get the conditions right that people want to take a chance and develop these, I think it can lead to a whole bunch of other downstream investment that can really get that main street that’s so historic and everyone knows in the west end back to vibrancy.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Evan Kenny