Hotel Europa

A single building at the corner of Bridge Street and Erie Avenue has welcomed weary travelers under five different names since 1910. The Trennick Hotel opened that June with forty rooms and a proprietor who would become mayor. It morphed into the Metropole in 1942, then the Mohawk, then the Lord Nelson in 1967, before finally settling on Hotel Europa. When a liquor inspector once discovered a piano in the ladies’ room, the manager insisted it was for a tap dancing school, not illicit entertainment.

Charles Newman ran the place for six years before he owned it outright, and by 1922 he’d traded hotel management for the mayor’s office, apparently deciding that one hospitality role was enough practice for another. His piano alibi held up rather well for its time: Prohibition-era Ontario had strict opinions about music near liquor, believing a beverage room with a record player was one step from moral collapse, and hotel managers spent the era finding creative workarounds. A piano earmarked for tap dancing lessons was, by the standards of the day, a reasonably plausible cover story. The building outlasted the argument, the inspector, and four more names before anyone thought to just call it Europa and leave it alone.