|
 Bozeman Hotel - Bozeman, MT Posted by:  T0SHEA
N 45° 40.768 W 111° 01.933
12T E 497490 N 5058435
Built in 1890-01, the Bozeman Hotel was then the landmark building in the district.
Waymark Code: WMW531
Location: Montana, United States
Date Posted: 07/10/2017
Views: 1
Photos here were taken from across Main Street on the corner of Main and Rouse Avenue, looking northwest.
The Bozeman Hotel, at the east end, and the Baxter Hotel, at the west end, serve as bookends for the Main Street Historic District, defining its east and west ends, respectively. The Baxter, incidentally, came much later, arriving on the scene in 1928.
When the hotel opened in 1891, it was “the most elaborate, complete and comfortable caravansary so far constructed in the state,” the Bozeman Chronicle reported at the time.
Butte architect George Hancock created the plans for the hotel. Brick, stone and timber was hauled in from Montana near and far. After a year of construction, the furnished hotel cost prominent Bozeman resident George Wakefield between $110,000 and $150,000.
The hotel was lauded at the time as the most luxurious hotel in central Montana, with 136 guest rooms, 100 windows along Main Street, call bells, steam heat, fire escapes and hot and cold water.
The Hotel Bozeman had a costly and brilliantly lighted lobby, the most spacious and pleasant reading room in Montana, a dining room with a seating capacity of 150, and an elegant bar room, its own electric light plant, a barber shop, and a lady’s parlor with private entrance and staircase.
Once the oldest running hotel in town, the building changed hands and ceased to operate as a hotel in the mid-1970s. After extensive renovations, it reopened as commercial space.
Now, the hotel is home to more than 50 businesses and one residence.
From the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (July 13, 2011)
Bozeman Hotel
That year [1891] marked the completion of three major masonry buildings at the corner of Rouse and Main, intended to rapidly urbanize the city. The Hotel Bozeman, an immense, four story, Romanesque style building and the only one of the three still standing, represented perhaps more than any other single structure, Bozeman's unabashed ambition to win the distinction of state capital in a state-wide vote in 1892. George Hancock, an architect from Fargo, North Dakota, set up a temporary branch office in Bozeman specifically to design and oversee the construction of the hotel, as well as other monumental buildings being erected at the time.
If the long-awaited railroad was the first milestone toward Bozeman's coming of age from an outpost community to a city, the completion of the Hotel Bozeman, also long-awaited, was certainly the second. Calls for a "modern hotel" had appeared in the Avant Courier since the early 1880s. In a letter to that newspaper in 1891, John Vesuvius, as early Bozeman mayor, confided that "Walter Cooper and I once vowed that if ever Bozeman got a railroad and a modern hotel, we'd get drunk.." Indeed, theirs was not the only celebration, for on March 2, 1891, eight years after the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Bozeman, a grand opening celebration took place in the new hotel that rivaled the festivities that ushered in the railroad. The first class hotel, considered an indispensable amenity for any respectable city, was a community effort, $20,000 being raised by local citizens as a "cash bonus," which helped to lure a credulous group of Boston capitalists, who put up $100,000.
The Hotel Bozeman, as well as the other buildings of comparable scale built
concurrently, was indicative more of community ambition and optimism rather than the state of the economy. Indeed, these buildings, along with three elaborate residences (all three still standing), comprised virtually the only significant construction in the city during what was an economically depressed decade of the 1890s.
...the Hotel Bozeman (321 E. Main), most notable for its landmark scale and corner orientation, is a vernacular example of the Romanesque style...
From the NRHP Continuation Sheet
See Section number 8, Page 19.
| |
The Bozeman Hotel - 1890s - 2017 |
| |
The Bozeman Hotel - 2017 - 1890s |
Year photo was taken: ca 1892
|
Visit Instructions:
To log a visit to each spot you are required to take your own photo. Alternatively you can tell a story about your own experience at the location or any unique information about that location to count as a visit.
Recent Visits/Logs:
| There are no logs for this waymark yet. |
|
|
|
|