- West Hotel
Opened in 1884, the West Hotel was
Minneapolis ' first grand hotel. It had 407 luxuriously furnished rooms, 140 baths, and featured an immense and opulent lobby which was claimed to be the largest in the nation. These elements combined to make what was considered for a time to be the most luxurious hotel west ofChicago . The West was designed byLeRoy Buffington and built on land that was once owned by the first resident of Minneapolis,John H. Stevens . Buffington created the West in theQueen Anne style that was quite popular in the last decades of the 19th century.The Queen Anne style featured an elaborate architectural look that included
gable roofs, projectingbay window s, towers, anddormer windows. The West combined most of these concepts into a grand, larger than life look that seems graceless to some modern observers but was a popular building style at the time, a style that was introduced in 1876 at theCentennial Exposition inPhiladelphia .The West hotel was situated on the southwest corner of the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street (the site currently occupied, in part, by the Shubert Theatre, moved there in 1999), in the center of a burgeoning entertainment district that started coming together in the 1880s and was a temporary home to such well-known public figures as
Mark Twain andWinston Churchill . It also catered to delegates of the 1892Republican National Convention (held at theExposition Building across theMississippi River ). It was Minneapolis's largest and most luxurious hotel for many years after its construction.In 1906 a large fire burned though the hotel killing 11 people. That and a general business downturn caused the West to go through a period of decline and finally in 1940 the West Hotel was demolished.
External links
* [http://www.ronnei.com/wsc_minnesota.html Churchill in Minneapolis]
* [http://www.mplib.org/history/index.asp Minneapolis Library]
* [http://collections.mnhs.org/visualresources/Results.cfm?Page=1&Digital=Yes&Keywords=%22West%20Hotel%22&SearchType=Basic&CFID=891745&CFTOKEN=32043205 West Hotel images from Minnesota Historical Society collection]
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