THE STAYING POWER OF CHICAGO’S PALMER HOUSE
Its doors closed indefinitely, Chicago’s grand Palmer House Hilton is now smothered in debt and under foreclosure. The storied hotel faces an uncertain future, but nothing like the one that attended its infancy. Little more than a year after its grand opening, the original Palmer House was consumed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Yet, like the mythological phoenix, the Palmer House rose from its ashes. Rebuilt quickly after the fire, and then rebuilt again in 1925, it still bears witness to a Gilded Age love story.
The hotel was a gift from Potter Palmer, the real-estate mogul who developed State Street, to his bride, Bertha Honore, a great beauty half his age. As the Tribune reported about the wedding in 1870, a hotel wasn’t Palmer’s original idea of a suitable wedding present:
“The engagement has been short — only two months. It is stated that the bridegroom, when going away recently, offered to settle a million dollars on his intended bride but she nobly and persistently refused. This may put an end to the bitter observations of envious or cynical persons inclined to stamp the marriage contract — so momentous to the high contacting parties — as a commercial transaction.”
Palmer was again away from the city when the Chicago Fire broke out. But he signaled his determination to rebuild by sending word to preserve the hotel plans from the flames.
The following August, the Tribune lavishly praised Palmer’s new hotel, even as it was being built.
“It will be the crowning work of his life, and a hundred years from now, when he is not with us, nor we with the world, his name will be inseparably associated with his great enterprise,” the paper predicted. “All the marble work is being executed in far-off Italy, and will soon be ready for shipment.”
When its success outran its capacity, that seven-story Palmer House was replaced by the current structure. Half of its predecessor was left in place while a new 23-story building was built. Then the remaining section of the old building was knocked down and replaced. Accordingly, the hotel continued to operate through its transformation.
Through its three iterations, the Palmer House has witnessed a number of historic events: Gen. George Armstrong Custer was subject to a posthumous hearing in 1879 at the Palmer House, and held responsible for the disastrous Battle of the Little Bighorn. In 1895, the first intercollegiate sports association (subsequently called the Big Ten) was formed at the Palmer House.
But the true history of the Palmer House is less about who stayed there and more about the opulence that surrounded them.
Potter Palmer died in 1902, and Bertha Potter died in 1918. But Bertha passed along her fascination with the scale of the Sistine Chapel (if not its religious iconography).
The grand lobby was decorated with neoclassical works of art, and the ceiling bore 21 paintings of scenes from Greek mythology.
At the dedication of a cornerstone for the 1925 structure, Potter Palmer Jr. “put into a hollow of the stone one of the silver dollars that studded the barber shop floor in the old days of the hotel,” as the Tribune noted.
British writer Rudyard Kipling was not impressed. “They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere,” he wrote after visiting Chicago in 1889.
Decades later, newspaper columnist George Will pronounced the Palmer House’s lobby “a wonderful protest of romance against the everydayness of life.”
At the north end of the lobby
“It will be the crowning work of his life, and a hundred years from now, when he is not with us, nor we with the world, his name will be inseparably associated with his great enterprise.” — The Tribune lavishly praising Palmer’s new hotel, even as it was being built
was the Empire Room. An enormous nightclub, it opened in 1933 against the headwinds of the Great Depression. Over the years, the great stars of the era — Jimmy Durante, Carol Channing, Sid Caesar and others — appeared there.
Presiding over the Empire Room with an iron hand was Victor “Fritz” Hagner, the maitre d’, as Channing recalled to a Tribune reporter long afterward.
“If someone ordered a drink during a show, Fritz practically hit them over the head with a baseball bat,” she said. “Fritz was the Pope. He kept the room like a cathedral.”
In 1945, Conrad Hilton bought the Palmer House, and the Empire Room was converted into a banquet hall in 1971. New Yorkbased Thor Equities is the current owner, but it was sued Aug. 20 by Wells Fargo Bank over missed payments on a $330 million loan. Closed since March because of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s unclear if or when — or under what ownership — the hotel might continue.
We can only hope that the Palmer House’s financial issues will be resolved so we can stand outside the Empire Room’s enormous doors and fantasize that we’re about to enter during its heyday.
Until then, photographs will have to carry us there on wings of imagination. The crowd settles down, an announcement is made: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Empire Room proudly presents Miss Carol Channing!”
And when the applause dies down, we sense the presence of a raspy voice singing:
“Hello, Dolly / Well, hello, Dolly / It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.”