Shoreland Hotel
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The Shoreland is a former hotel in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. It was added to the United States National Register of Historic Places in 1986. It is currently a dormitory of the University of Chicago.
[edit] History
The Shoreland was opened in 1926 by Harry Fawcett, who reportedly spent $2 million on furnishings alone. The Shoreland Hotel maintained 1,000 guest rooms over 13 floors, a crystal ballroom, a large banquet hall with a top-notch restaurant and an immaculate lobby with 30-foot-high ceilings. Its terra-cotta exterior featured gargoyles and other elaborate stonework. It hosted countless wedding receptions and parties for Chicago's elite, including a massive banquet held when Amelia Earhart returned triumphantly in 1928 to the Hyde Park neighborhood where she had attended high school. Later, Al Capone was known to conduct "business" in certain rooms. In the 1950s, Jimmy Hoffa kept a room in the hotel and often held raucous union meetings there. As the story goes, one of Hoffa's underlings strangled a hotel worker in the lobby after he dared to ask the union boss to pay his debt to the hotel. That worker's wife was the hotel manager, making the Shoreland the largest hotel in the country with a woman in charge, at the time. Another notable resident was Milton Friedman, who occupied rooms in the Shoreland at the same time as Hoffa. Elvis Presley also spent several nights at the Shoreland.
[edit] Today
Over time the hotel has begun to lose its splendor, and in the 1970s it was sold for $750,000 to the University of Chicago, for which it is currently an undergraduate dormitory building housing about 650 students. It is now known as "Shoreland Hall." However, in the spring of 2004 the university decommissioned the Shoreland as a dormitory, citing increasing maintenance costs and decreasing popularity among incoming students. It will remain in use by the university through spring quarter of 2008, after which it will be turned over to Kenard Corporation, a Chicago developer that specializes in historical preservation. It was sold for $5.25 million, and Kenard Corp. plans to turn it into 260 condominiums. Hal Lichterman, the president of the corporation, had said he hoped to put a restaurant in the old banquet hall and would otherwise gut the building. He had hoped to restore some of the elaborate plasterwork that remains and to fix the facade.
In fall 2006, after Hal Lichterman's untimely death, Kenard Developers resold the Shoreland for $10 million to R.D. Horner & Associates, one of the the three initial bidders on the property. Horner & Associates plans to carry out Kenard's exact plans for converting the dormitory into condominiums, opening the building as early as late 2009.
[edit] References
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