Chicago Apartment History – Residential Hotels
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This series highlights the history and variety of Chicago’s multifamily architecture.
This cache is an example of Chicago’s residential hotels – many were converted to apartment buildings.
This cache is not located at the coordinates. From the coordinates, WALK 85’ WEST into a private building (cache placed by permission). Check out the art gallery as you go. Cache is located on your left.
It is a medium-size container sufficient to hold small trade items and travel bugs.
This cache represents an example of Chicago’s residential hotels – many of which were later converted to apartment buildings.
From early in its history, Chicago's hotels catered both to tourists and to longer-term residents who paid by the week or month instead of by the night. Until 1930, people might move to Chicago and never live anywhere except in a hotel. A room or suite of rooms in a palatial hotel (for the rich) or a middle-priced hotel (for those of middle income) were luxurious, conveniently located, and cheaper than maintaining a private house in the city. Hotels gave Chicago residents an instant social position, and interaction with some of the wealthiest residents of the city. Many of Chicago’s women physicians and businesswomen could pursue their professional lives only because hotel life freed them from household duties.
Mid-priced and palace-style hotels probably housed only about one-sixth of Chicago's hotel residents. Another one-third of the city's hotel residents lived in a widely varied class of dwellings called “rooming houses.” A rooming house might range from a former single-family house to a three-hundred-room hostelry. Rooming house residents, half of them men, half women, and most of them young, worked as department store clerks, secretaries, salesmen, or in journeymen construction building trades. Such work could not be counted on for every season of the year, so residents had to be within reasonable walking distance of multiple jobs. The Near North Side was the city's most extensive rooming house district.
For people who were marginally employed in common labor jobs (from digging ditches to living in the off-season from field work or railroad construction) the only available homes were in hotel buildings disparagingly called “cheap lodging houses.” Typically, half of a city's hotel homes were in such structures. In Chicago, the former Main Stem area on West Madison Street was nationally famous, although there were other cheap lodging house districts in the Near North and in several blocks in the racially segregated South Side.
During World War I and World War II, every type of residential hotel was filled to capacity with war workers. After 1945, however, many employers either closed or moved their factories to the edge of town. The cheap lodging house areas, especially, regained the reputation they had gained in the 1930s as “skid roads,” known for large numbers of down-and-out men incorrectly assumed to be transients.
A postwar excess of lodging house rooms led city planners to see hotel districts as ideal for urban renewal demolition. By the 1960s, the clearances were no longer eliminating excess rooms but rooms desperately needed for an increasingly fragile low-income population.
Many former residential hotels with good locations and in good condition were spared the wrecking ball and converted for use as more traditional apartment buildings.
The Belmont is a well-preserved and architecturally noteworthy example of the large residential hotels constructed along Chicago’s Lakeshore in the decade following World War I. The $6 million, twelve-story structure was completed in 1923 and dedicated by Mayor William E. Dever on February 7, 1924 with a dinner dance attended by 500 guests. The Belmont featured 693 rooms, a 500-seat dining room, private function rooms, a ball room, a roof garden, coffee shop, and retail shops at the ground floor.
The Belmont was converted to apartment use 1993 and the current owners recently completed a comprehensive renovation of the building’s common areas and apartments.
Source: Groth, Paul. Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. 1994.
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