Van Horne Mansion

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's Italianate house to fifty-two rooms. Hamilton had hired architect John William Hopkins (also with Daniel Berkley Wily) and was completed in 1869. 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. ==Van Horne Art Collection==

As a child, Van Horne collected fossils. He was also an excellent violinist and artist in his own right. When he was older, Van Horne was not just a serious collector, he had a passion for art: "A picture that you feel you do not really want is always an incubus and a source of dissatisfaction". He also collected many modern works, and in his catalogue of 1892, all but two of the forty nine works listed were from the 19th century. In April 1933 a fire damaged some of the paintings, but the same year Frits Lugt paid a visit to an exhibition of the collection and made notes about several of the same paintings, indicating they were not all lost. ==Demolition==

The building was controversially torn down by developer David Azrieli in 1973 under the mayoralty of Jean Drapeau, who declared that it was impossible to preserve it for cultural reasons because it was not part of Quebec's culture - Hamilton and Van Horne being Anglophone Quebecers (Hamilton was from Ontario and Van Horne was American). It was replaced by a sixteen-storey concrete tower. The mansion's destruction sparked the creation of the heritage preservation group Save Montreal. Journalist William Weintraub includes the house and its demolition in his 1993 documentary, The Rise and Fall of English Montreal, identifying the significance of the building to the local Anglo community's heritage. ==References==