Something you do when you have a mouthful of your favorite brew and someone tells a really funny joke.

The brickwork on the Imperial Hotel is fantastic. It's incredible the workmanship that was put into those old buildings. It's too bad that so many of them are gone now. I doubt that kind of work could be duplicated today.

That's a design I don't recall seeing before. The more familiar one, still in use today, can be seen as early as 1906 in a photo from the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum:

Does anyone see the local cop on the corner? He was sure to know everyone on his patrol!

"Hurry up and take the picture, Sonny! I ain't got all day you know."

Does anyone know which streets we see in this picture?

[Falls and Second. - Dave]

Looks to me like the photographer didn't pull off the tilt-shift quite right.

I had no idea that our current round top US Mail box was only a 20th century creation. Would love to see more shots of this earlier incarnation, and get an idea of when these were actually made. When did the ones we now know begin?

The perspective of this photo makes me dizzy. It looks like the walls are about to fall outward.

Could you replicate this photo with a modern DSLR? You would need a stack of ND filters in order to drag the shutter enough to blur the walkers in what looks to be bright sun. They would have to be very expensive ND filters to get that tack sharp resolution.

I'm not even sure there is a lens available for a 35mm camera that would give you that wide of an angle without an extreme fisheye effect. The photographer is standing across the street from a 6 story building, and not only get the entire building in the shot but we can see halfway down the block as well. Amazing!

[Size-wise, you're comparing apples to olives. The digital analogue to images made with an 8x10 view camera would be taken with a medium- or large-format camera (Hasselblad, Phase One, Better Light) with a digital back. We have one example here. - Dave]

The upper facade of the hotel seems to be angling outward in a rather unsettling manner. But as the top of the telegraph pole on the right appears to have the same problem, I trust the hotel is in fact quite normal and the issue instead has to do with the photographer's perspective.

[The pole does have a pronounced curve, but the hotel is exactly vertical. The tilt-shift lenses used in these view cameras do create a distinctive exaggerated geometry, however. - Dave]

Spray Beer was apparently (and appropriately) a Niagara region institution!

Having worked with the public and had people ask me "Do you work here?" while I am standing behind the cash, wearing a tacky polyester uniform with a large name-tag with the name of the store, I know that with multiple signs stating "Hotel Imperial" in every nook and cranny, people would STILL ask "Is this the Hotel Imperial?"

My favourite "Do you work here?" story: I was standing with a number of other employees, all of us wearing our bright red and white polyester uniform pant-suits, with our company name tags, all holding price-guns and a woman came up and asked "Do you work here?"

Without missing a beat I said to her "No. Sorry. We are a club which goes from store to store repricing merchandise. This is our club outfit."

The woman looked at us with confusion and said "Ummm... Oh... Sorry..." and wandered off.

Another primo example of extraordinary masonry. Beauty is in the details----to paraphrase another artist.

I see the name "Hotel Imperial" seven times, eight if you count the unseen side of the entryway on the right side of the building.