And then came the Hotel Henley
Chance and the QEW helped create popular St. Catharines restaurant, hotel and entertainment space
It all began with Pat’s Tea Room.
In 1940 Robert Thompson and family noticed that every time people wanted to celebrate something they would head out to a place in Turners Corners and celebrate there. Why is that, they thought. Why don’t we have a place like that in St. Catharines?
They soon rented a house on Geneva Street, out where Fairview Mall is today, and there established an eating place they called Pat’s Tea Room. They got themselves established there, business was good, the clientele was developing nicely. And then, in 1942, the rented house was expropriated.
It happened to be standing right where the Ontario Ministry of Transportation wanted to build a service road for its brand new superhighway, the Queen Elizabeth Way.
What to do? There was no fighting the expropriation order. So the Thompsons took a little nest egg they had and used it to purchase a small property near the intersection of that new superhighway and Ontario Street. It was also quite near the Henley rowing course and the QEW’s new Henley Bridge, so they dubbed their new establishment Club Henley.
The location of the club by the busy QEW-Ontario Street intersection combined with the reputation of the owners from their time running Pat’s Tea Room was a winning combination, and the next decades saw steady growth of the business. Over time the original Club Henley morphed into the Henley Hotel and Henley Motel, with two stages of expansion westward along Henley Drive, offering ever more lodging places for travellers.
One important change resulted from a trip that some members of the Thompson family made out to California. While in Los Angeles they had visited a place called the Hollywood Palladium, a huge combination dance hall and restaurant. St. Catharines ought to have a place like that.
They came back, sold the idea to the rest of the family, and by 1946 the Thompsons had added what they called “the round room” to the original Club Henley building (it’s the round building you can see in our old photo this week) — a space for dining and dancing.
It later found use as a popular performing space for touring performers, a popular place to dance and otherwise be entertained. It became a popular place for local groups to have their annual banquets, and by the 1980s a popular gathering place for local teens to enjoy popular music in the kind of non-alcoholic setting that eased their parents’ worries.
But then, in a move that seems to have been brought about in part by the city planning department’s feeling that a commercial mall would be a better use of the site than the entertainment and lodging offered by the Henley, city council agreed to have a shopping plaza replace the Hotel Henley.
In 1988 the Hotel Henley property was purchased by local developer Art Ellis, and by the end of that year a Toronto developer had stepped in, was demolishing the Hotel Henley and would soon replace it with today’s Henley Square commercial plaza.