Hotel Senator sign lost for decades resurfaces on Marketplace

There are plenty of ways to find a piece of history.

You can dig through archives. You can knock down a wall. You can spend years hunting through dusty boxes in a basement.

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Or, apparently, you can simply scroll through Facebook Marketplace. That’s how this piece of the Hotel Senator’s past came home.

Chris Beavis’ family bought the Senator Hotel in 1967. His father modernized the exterior in the ’70s, adding neon signs with flashing lights. (Saskatoon Public Library)

To understand why an old sign turning up online is such a strange little piece of history, you have to go back a few decades to a very different Hotel Senator.

When owner and general manager Chris Beavis’ family bought the downtown Saskatoon hotel in 1967, the property entered another chapter in its long life.

Built in 1907 and originally known as the Flanagan Hotel, it had already witnessed generations of Saskatoon’s history. And, like just about every hotel, it kept changing with the times.

By the mid-1970s, updating the hotel meant making it bigger, brighter and harder to miss. There were neon lights. Flashing bulbs. Spinning signs.

“It was very much the style at the time, to modernize,” Beavis said.

The Hotel Senator had its own version of that era, including the big spinning Hotel Senator “S” sign and another sign mounted beneath the front portico.

For a while, that was the look. Then, as it tends to do, time moved on.

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In 1989, the property began moving toward a more sympathetic heritage restoration, stripping away some newer additions and resurrecting elements of the building’s older character. The signs came down and, as far as anyone knew, they were gone.

“I believe we just sent them all to the junkyard at the time,” Beavis recalled.

But earlier this month, the hotel’s director of operations spotted the sign on Facebook Marketplace.

“I actually couldn’t believe it was on there,” Beavis said, “because I thought everything was in the junkyard and rusted away or broken and gone.”

But there it was. Still intact. Still recognizable. And, astonishingly, almost pristine.

“I would say it’s almost in the same condition when it was removed in 1989 as it is now,” Beavis said.

Somewhere between the Hotel Senator and Facebook Marketplace, the sign had spent more than three decades in storage.

Exactly where is part of the mystery. But its next destination was considerably easier to determine: Home.

The sign was removed from the hotel in 1989. More than three decades later, it’s still in nearly pristine condition. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

“We made a deal, and we went and picked it up,” Beavis said.

A few days later, the old sign was back on Hotel Senator property.

For Beavis, the return of the sign is about more than a piece of old décor. He has spent almost 40 years at the hotel. He has watched his family transform it over and over again.

“I kind of grew up at this property,” he said.

The hotel has changed dramatically over the decades. Renovations erased some things and restored others. And occasionally, the building gave something back.

During a recent renovation, the hotel uncovered original stained glass from its days as the Flanagan Hotel. It had been hidden beneath three layers of drywall, plaster and a drop ceiling. The half-moon stained glass, imported from Ireland, bears the initials “FH” for Flanagan Hotel.

“That was one of the neatest finds that we’ve made here,” Beavis said.

This stained glass was uncovered during a recent renovation. It had been hidden beneath three layers of drywall, plaster and a drop ceiling. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)

There is also the story of a long-lost mural by a famous painter that was supposedly covered during renovations. Nobody knows exactly what became of it. One version of the story suggests a former manager may have rolled it up and walked out with it.

The mural remains a mystery, but the stained glass survived behind a wall. And now an old Hotel Senator sign has turned up after 37 years in hiding.

For Beavis, seeing it again brought back memories of all the different versions of the property he’s known.

“It was very cool to see a piece of that history and memories of what we’ve done come back and circle around here,” he said.

Turns out, not everything that disappears is really gone. And not everything that looks like junk is junk.

Beavis joked that his staff members think he’s a bit of a pack rat, but he says there is a practical reason for keeping pieces of the past around.

“Sometimes we actually do reuse and need things, and we save money that way,” he said.

Of course, there is a limit.

“Thirty-five years of storage — that’s a problem,” Beavis admitted. “Where do you put it, and what do you do with it?”

In this case, the answer turned out to be remarkably simple:

Wait 37 years, find it on Facebook Marketplace, and put it back.

You never know what you might find on Facebook Marketplace. In this case, it was a Hotel Senator sign that owner Chris Beavis thought had been sent to the junkyard 37 years ago. (Brittany Caffet/650 CKOM)