50 Years Ago

Sunday, Jan. 24, 1971

General Forrest Hotel to close

The General Forrest, Rome’s last metropolitan hotel to serve the public in recent years, will close its doors on Monday, Feb. 1, to the traveling public and to permanent residents, bringing to a close a 55year career of service to the community.

The Forrest’s dining room will remain open, along with the four private banquet rooms for catering occasions and for the considerable number of civic clubs and fraternal groups which have met regularly for many years at the hotel.

“Closing creates a unique set of problems,” says Roger Hackett, active in the hotel’s operation for the past 35 years. “The doors of the General Forrest have been open 24 hours a day for 55 years – since Sept. 26, 1915 – without any thought of their being closed. The management doesn’t even have keys for them, since it was never expected that the hotel would ever need locking up.”

Discontinuing utilities to the 97 bedrooms of the four upper floors is a problem in itself; heating so many vacant rooms is impractical, but must be continued unless running water service is halted and all pipes drained. Electrical power offers less difficulty, but the central switchboard with over 100 telephones must be removed.

“These services have been maintained for 55 years,” Roger Hackett says, “with considerable revenue to Rome’s utility companies. The Forrest was the first commercial account signed by the Gas Company here when the hotel converted from a coal furnace to gas back in 1928. Before this date we maintained a boilerman to stoke the furnace, and had coal unloaded into the basement through a manhole in the sidewalk outside.”

The coal chute manhole, dating back to the building of the General Forrest in 1915, may still be seen a couple of feet from the curb in front of the hotel. The building’s basement extends beneath the sidewalk to the street’s edge.