"Last Days at the St. Louis" won an Honourable Mention at the 2008 National Magazine Award for Words and Pictures.

A photographer’s journal

In December 2006, the St. Louis Hotel and beer parlour in Calgary—once a favourite haunt of Ralph Klein, former premier of Alberta—closed its doors after ninety-two years of operation. George Webber made many visits to the hotel during its final weeks, with his camera and his notebook.

LATE AUGUST 2006

Pete Rosenvard, who has been on the front desk for twenty years, dresses like a tradesman in matching navy blue twill pants and work shirt, and he keeps his belt done up with a big ram’s head buckle. He is sixty-three years old and a veteran of the Canadian army, in which he served for three and a half years. He did time for assault but that was thirty-five years ago, he says.

The bar at the St. Louis is a dimly lit, smoky little grotto of a place down a flight of stairs below street level. Ralph Cusack, a tall, gaunt, almost toothless man, introduces himself while I’m photographing the fried potato wedges near the bar. He wants to know why I’m taking pictures down there. Later he defends me from a drunken patron offended by my camera and offers to walk me to my car. He shows me a safe way to leave the building through the back door to avoid the crack addicts at the front.

Peggy the blonde waitress tells me that when she was fourteen she was abducted by two men while hitchhiking near Hope, B.C. She managed to escape by kicking out the car window. She wears an orthotic brace on her right arm, a legacy of too many years carrying trays of beer.

A dark, rather forbidding First Nations man motions me to his table and asks what I’m doing. He offers me a beer and I settle for a ginger ale. He served four tours of duty as a special operations sniper in Vietnam and Cambodia. He took out his first “targets” shortly after he turned eighteen. “I got to know fear,” he says. “It’s better than cocaine. The sky is bluer. The grass is greener.”

AUGUST 30, 2006

The man at the next table in the hotel coffee shop tells me he served in the Canadian navy, worked as a hard-rock miner in the nickel mines in Sudbury, and drove a cement truck in Calgary.

His name is Ed Mielke. “I built this city,” he says.

AUGUST 31, 2006

Morning. A man about my age driving a battered baby blue pickup truck pulls up in front of the St. Louis and drops off a young Native woman. She walks away from the truck and around the corner without looking back. A tall, well-built man in a white track suit walks over to me. He points at himself with his thumb. “I’m a criminal,” he says. “Armed robbery. I’m thirty-eight. Since I was eleven I’ve only been out of prison for five years. I’m trying to get a job as a personal trainer but I’m covered with tattoos and I need credentials. But I’m happy to be out, and hey—I’m gettin’ laid.”

At Simple Simon Pies across the street from the St. Louis, the woman behind the counter tells me they had to shut down for a couple of days a few years ago when someone was murdered in their doorway. The owner is a jocular British guy. He tells me to stop by later for a couple of free pies.

A dishevelled woman standing near the front door of the St. Louis asks me if I want to take some “porno pictures” of her. I tell her I would prefer to take some pictures of her just as she is near the front of the hotel. She asks me for ten dollars. I pass her a ten-dollar bill. Just then a burgundy car pulls up and two police officers step out. The woman runs off—no pictures.

Stop in at the coffee shop. Two men walk in and sit at the adjoining table. We start to chat. Their names are Everett Smith and Mike Merkly. Mike turned sixty-six yesterday. After coffee I photograph him in the lobby. Later I photograph Everett in his room. He’s fifty-two and on disability assistance. Tells me he did “the hippie thing” when he was young, getting by on five dollars a day. “This’ll be the only record of me that’s ever gonna be,” he says.

SEPTEMBER 1, 2006

It’s morning, across the street from the St. Louis. A Native man dressed all in black shambles over. He tilts his head and says, “Hey man—do you want to photograph my nuts?”

SEPTEMBER 15, 2006

David, one of the men who live at the St. Louis, approaches me across from the hotel. “You better watch it,” he says. “If those crackheads see you they’re gonna change the whole direction of your day.”

I step into the barbershop adjoining the St. Louis. The proprietor, Sam Iovinelli, tells me that October will mark the forty-second anniversary of his business. After a successful career as a prizefighter in Italy, he came to Calgary in 1957 and graduated from barber college in 1962 .

I head over to the St. Louis and photograph the bartender, Zana. Her black T-shirt reads: Some days you feel like a slut—Some days you don’t.

Back at the barbershop a middle-aged man with an Elvis haircut says to me, “I’ve been comin’ here for thirty years. Won’t let anyone else touch my hair, but the neighbourhood has gone bad with the crack addicts. Yesterday in the washroom at the St. Louis, somebody offered to sell me ten pairs of ninety-dollar jeans for twenty dollars a pair. I told him I’d go to the Bay. I’ve got a black belt in karate. If any of these crackheads go for me they’re in for a surprise. The people I feel sorry for are these young girls. They’ll suck your dick for twenty dollars to buy a little piece of crack.”

In the parking lot a man and woman walk past me and continue to the turquoise portable toilet at the east end of the parking lot. She enters first, then he follows and closes the door.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2006

I meet a woman wearing a long coat, a bustier, imitation reptile skin pants and black platform shoes. She appears to be in her mid-forties. We met earlier in Sam’s barbershop. I ask if I can take some photographs. “It will cost you forty dollars. Do you think it’s worth it?” Her name is Kitalina and she’s originally from the States. She’s forty-seven and has three sons and four daughters ranging in age from seventeen to thirty. She wears a number of rings, including a wedding band.

News of the imminent closure of the St. Louis has spread through Calgary.

I ask the Chinese couple who own the hotel restaurant how they feel about that. “Happy,” the husband replies.

I meet a man who says he’s fifty-four but looks much older. He tells me that he works as a painter. “I’m scared and I have two problems—booze and gambling,” he says. “I used to make ninety thousand a year. Now I’m sleepin’ outside by the river three nights a week.”

OCTOBER 28, 2006

The crowd in the bar is in a friendly mood tonight. I do some photography at people’s tables. I sit with Maddy, the chambermaid and waitress at the St. Louis. She’s a strapping, powerful woman who spends most of the night defeating the men at the pool table. She’s happy, having just secured a new job as an assistant cook and an apartment in a trendy neighbourhood. As the night wears on, her mood changes. She casts a dark glance across the room to where a young woman is sitting and says, “That little crack whore Joanie. After I helped her I caught her with a crack pipe in the bathroom. I smacked her and knocked her down. She’s been givin’ blow jobs in the parkin’ lot for ten dollars.”

NOVEMBER 12, 2006

I don’t feel like I belong here tonight. Take a photograph of myself in the cracked mirror of the men’s washroom next to the condom machine.

NOVEMBER 13, 2006

Late afternoon. David invites me to share a table with him and his friend Debby. She says that four years ago she owned a house in the nearby town of Cochrane and had a good job. Now she lives in an inner-city shelter. She jokes that she could steal my camera and get $140 for crack. As she’s leaving, she smiles and says to David, “Maybe I’ll come over and sit on your face.” He smiles a weary smile and gently shakes his head.

Maddy brings David his beer. She’s not in a good mood. She keeps her head down and doesn’t acknowledge my presence. David explains later that the eight hundred dollars Maddy put up for the apartment had been ripped off. There had been no apartment. The address she had been given didn’t exist. There was no job for her either. Before leaving for his doctor’s appointment for his ongoing problems with malaria, David reminds me that Maddy is making seven dollars an hour working at the St. Louis.

Later I meet Bernie Taylor sitting at a table by himself nursing a beer. He bears a striking resemblance to Santa Claus in the movie Miracle on 34th Street. Bernie lives in a nearby east-end apartment. He tells me that before moving to Calgary about eight years ago, he was heavily involved in the Toronto arts scene, a founder of a major Toronto art fair and a dealer in art and photography.

He glances over and there is a twinkle in his eye as he says, “The St. Louis is Calgary’s Moulin Rouge.”

George Webber’s work has appeared in Geist several times, as well as in many other Canadian magazines, and his photographs are part of the collections of Canadian and international museums and galleries. His most recent book is People of the Blood: A Decade-long Photographic Journey on a Canadian Reserve (Fifth House) and his work can also be seen at georgewebber.ca.