The lengthy history of the Royal Hotel in Prince Edward County began in 1879, when it opened as a railway hotel. Over the decades, the building lived through many iterations, until it was finally left abandoned in 2008. A few years later, the property was discovered in a state of ruin by the Sorbara family, who decided to restore it to a proper hotel once more. In 2016, renovations were slated to begin. For the photographers Ginger Sorbara and Greg Pacek, there was a pressure to preserve images of the space before that happened. It was the end of an era, and that particular moment in time was about to evaporate.

Sorbara notes that in the field of photography, there’s a tradition of photographing the mundane and the ordinary, rather than large, grand moments in history. The photos in this essay present the small story of a hotel and ...