1896: End Of The Lafayette Park Hotel

Tying loose ends

 I’ve recently written about the old Lafayette Park Hotel. It dated back to about 1875, and rather mysteriously disappeared from view with the great tornado of 1896. Architectural historian Michael Boyd got me started when he asked if I could find anything related to its demolition. I searched high and low. Nope. 

Here’s the first mention I could find of the building on Mississippi Avenue, just south of Park Avenue. It’s from August 29, 1875, a time when building activity was really taking off east of Lafayette Park:

The situation: 1875 – 1895

 The Lafayette Park Hotel was built by the Dillon Brothers, who held extensive property holdings in the Square. It was an extended stay establishment, with twenty en-suite rooms. At its inception, it was a classy place, well suited to the upper crust neighborhood surrounding the park. 

Things went well for years, and the hotel remained busy, with receptions, banquets, and an established clientele. The whole place went up for sale in 1890:

After sitting on the market, closed and empty for two years, William Swan, an experienced hotel manager from Kansas City, took a five year lease on the hotel. He planned a thorough remodeling, promising that when the contractors were through, “it will practically be a new building.” 

Advertisements from 1894 tout the “practically new” state of the hotel, and things appeared to be going satisfactorily until suddenly they weren’t. 

The Post-Dispatch of Friday, June 13, 1895 held some bad luck for everyone involved. It noted that Mrs. D. Swan moved her furniture from the building without notifying the guests. She closed the hotel, leaving her ten employees wondering whether they would be paid, and guests where they would get breakfast or sleep that night. 

A brief statement from Mrs. Swan stated that she quit because she “could not afford to keep boarders for her health.” She also claimed to have given everyone notice of her intentions on Monday of that week.” No-one in particular seemed to have received such notice.  

There was a protest. The servants alleged unpaid wages and the forty guests were furious over the inconvenience. As Mrs. Swan didn’t actually own most of the furniture, many of the guests simply slept in the deserted hotel that night. 

In any event, the hotel was soon back to its closed and vacated state. Perhaps the next development was all for the best. 

A big wind erases some history

On the afternoon of May 27, 1896, a tremendous cyclone struck Lafayette Square, causing destruction on a nearly biblical scale.  

Looking through dozens of pictures taken of the destruction to Lafayette Square, I couldn’t identify either the building or the wreckage from the Lafayette Park Hotel. Nor was there any mention made of it in the immediate newspaper accounts. It just seemed to vanish. The Whipple fire insurance map of 1896 shows a blank lot where the hotel stood during the first half of the year.

As it was really the only proper hostelry in the Square, it seemed conspicuous by its absence. 

About two years later, I stumbled on a combination of things that cracked the mystery. 

Word sleuthing toward an answer

Early Lafayette Square was a heavily Germanic neighborhood in the 1890s. In fact, most of the advertising for the Lafayette Park Hotel appeared in the German language newspapers of the time. Here’s an example from 1893:  

Translating that is beyond my skill set, a problem compounded by the old German type used in the printing. 

I began searching through the German papers, just looking for articles referencing the hotel. A short entry from a Westliche Post of 1899 rang a bell when I recognized the word “tornado.” 

There’s a neat optical character recognition (OCR) freeware that actually can translate the old script into new German. you can find it here: https://2ocr.com/online-ocr-german/. 

Plugging the article in turned it to this:

Wird abgebrochen.

Das alte Lafayette Part Hotel an La- fayette und Mississippi Ave. wird zur

Zeit abgebrochen. Es war seiner Zeit bom Tornado übel zugerichtet worden

und bildete seither wegen seines bau-

fälligen Zustandes eine Gefahr für die

Nachbarschaft . An Stelle des alten soll

ein neues Hotel mit einem Rostenauf- wand von $20,000 errrichtet werden,

wozu die Architekten Kirchner und Kirch ner bie Pläne entworfen haben, doch ist

ber Plan noch nicht endgültig.

Then I entered that into Google Translate https://translate.google.com/ and it revealed some corrupted, but intelligible English. 

Is cancelled.

The old Lafayette Park Hotel at Lafayette and Mississippi Ave. is becoming

Time canceled. It had been badly damaged by a tornado in its time

and since then, because of his construction

due condition poses a danger to the

Neighborhood . In place of the old should

a new hotel will be built at a cost of $20,000,

what the architects Kirchner and Kirchner have drawn up plans for is

The plan is not yet final.

If you substitute the word “demolished” for “cancelled,” the idea becomes clear enough. The forecasted plans from a notable St Louis architecture firm never materialized. 

21st century technology reads a 19th century newspaper. It’s remarkable.

Gone, and largely forgotten

Just to check that, I went to the series of photos taken by Commissioner Leonard Hunt of Lafayette Park in 1903. One of the photos looks through the Mississippi Avenue side of the park, at the corner of Mississippi and Park Avenues. You can see the area is cleared, and fronted by a series of billboards.  

Even though the neighborhood largely rebuilt after the tornado, even the memory of the Lafayette Park Hotel faded quickly. By 1906, folks were wondering about the absence of a quality hotel in the area, as if there had never been one. Here’s an opinion piece from the Post-Dispatch of November 18 of that year: 

A tale like this is one reason an obsession with historical trivia can derail someone from more important pursuits. There is, however, a gratifying sense of accomplishment in just teasing a clear signal out of the historical noise. Brings the past a little closer to the moment. 

Resources

For more on Kirchner and Kirchner, Andrew Weil of Landmarks Association did a good review in 2015, at https://www.landmarks-stl.org/images/uploads/newsletters/LndMrk_Nwslttr_FALL15 v4.pdf

The 1903 Leonard Hunt photo series is available in an earlier essay here: lafayettesquarearchives.com/1903-photos-from-lafayette-park/