On one hand it could be said that The Davenport began with its opening in September of 1914. On the other hand it could be said that The Davenport really began in 1889 as two separate buildings, the Pennington Hotel and Davenport's Restaurant. In 1914, much of the block on which the hotel now stands was razed and the 14 story, 400 room Davenport built, incorporating the Pennington Hotel and parts of the Pfister Block with its magnificent Marie Antoinette Ball Room. This ball room was designed earlier by
Kirtland Cutter, the same architect responsible for the Davenport.
The hotel building now occupies two thirds of the block, with the still extant Pennington Hotel, incorporated as part of the Davenport, occupying the east one third of the block. The lower three floors occupy the entire footprint of the hotel, while the upper eleven floors form a "U" shape, facing south toward 1st. Avenue.
Unable to meet local building codes, the hotel was closed in 1985 and came perilously close to demolition when it was bought, in March of 2000, for $6.5 million and a further $37 million was poured into its restoration, culminating in its reopening in September of 2002.
The hotel was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
The interior of the hotel is truly amazing. Virtually everything in sight is decorated with busy ornament of cast and painted plaster or terra cotta. English oak stained dark is used extensively. The main lobby, 108 feet by 12 feet, was decorated in the "Spanish Renaissance" style with great neo-Rococo fervor. Its entire twenty foot beamed ceiling was an expansive skylight of "opalescent glass." It is said that parrots in cages hung under the surrounding gallery between each set of supporting piers. There was a profusion of potted palms.
The Isabella Room, also in Spanish Renaissance style but with a "treatment[that] reflects little, if any, of the Moorish influence shown in the lobby", has an arabesque with representations of boys, birds, rabbits, foxes, turtles and other creatures. All the column capitals have bolsters with chimeras — the body of a lion with cloven hoofs and a human head.
There was a total of seventeen ball, banquet, and convention rooms elaborately decorated in a number of different styles. The Hall of the Doges was "strikingly suggestive of the palaces of Italian Doges of medieval times." Its ceilings are vaulted and frescoed with a tracery clerestory. The oak paneled Elizabethan Rooms (A, B, C and D) were in the style of the Tudors "accurately portrayed in every detail."
The oak furniture was "conscientiously copied from the most famous Elizabethan pieces."
Other spaces were known as the Gothic Room, Green Room, Mandarin Room and Arabic Tent Room.
From The National Register