Hotel · Douglas, Arizona · Built 1907; rebuilt 1928–1929
The Gadsden Hotel
Listed on the National Register as Gadsden Hotel
A five-story fireproof hotel of 1928–29 in the border smelter town of Douglas, rebuilt by Trost & Trost after the 1907 original burned, with a gilded lobby, marble staircase and a 42-foot stained-glass desert mural.
History
Douglas grew up after 1901 around the copper smelters that processed ore from Bisbee and Nacozari, and it was a cattle town too, with ranches on both sides of the border. In 1907 the Douglas Investment Company, a mining and cattle concern, opened a hotel here designed by the El Paso firm of Trost and Trost and named for James Gadsden, who negotiated the 1853 purchase that brought this corner of Arizona into the United States. The first Gadsden had a marble staircase and pillars and a stained-glass window of trees and flowers, and its lobby became the place where ranchers, mining men and buyers did business.
Franklin O. Mackey and his wife bought the hotel in 1926. When fire destroyed it in February 1928, they had Trost and Trost rebuild it on the old plan but with concrete and steel framing throughout, so that even the partition walls contained no wood. Italian craftsmen did the marble, French plasterers carved the lobby ceiling and covered it with some $10,000 in gold leaf, and a stained-glass mural of the desert stretched across the mezzanine. The new hotel opened in 1929. Over the following decades it hosted Eleanor Roosevelt and, in 1962, Thornton Wilder, whose stop for a car repair stretched to two months. By 1976 the hotel needed costly repairs, and the nomination warned that prospective buyers planned to strip the lobby and turn the building into a retirement home; it was listed on the National Register that year instead and remained a hotel, with renovations of its lower floors in 2013–14. Legends of a ghost in Room 333 have brought it television attention.
“The Gadsden Hotel, since 1907, has been the social and economic center of the area and has witnessed millions of dollars worth of mining and cattle transactions.”
Architecture
The hotel is five stories over a full basement, roughly 150 feet square, with a square main floor and U-shaped upper floors around a light court; the basement walls are two feet thick under a reinforced-concrete ceiling. Outside it is restrained, its decoration limited to quoins and a simple entablature and frieze. The lobby carries the show: a white marble staircase rising to the mezzanine, massive marble columns with elaborate capitals, a red tile floor, a gilded carved-plaster ceiling and vaulted stained-glass skylights. The desert-scene window across the mezzanine is about 42 feet long. The mezzanine held offices, rooms and a banquet room, with a sundeck in front.
What to look for
- White marble staircase to the mezzanine
- Marble columns and gold-leaf ceiling in the lobby
- The 42-foot stained-glass desert mural
- Stained-glass skylights over the lobby
- Quoins on the plain exterior
Setting
The Gadsden stands on the southwest corner of 11th Street and G Avenue in downtown Douglas, a few blocks from the Mexican border crossing to Agua Prieta, Sonora. It shares its block with the Phelps Dodge Mercantile building and faces the 1917 Grand Theatre across G Avenue. The Swisshelm Mountains rise to the north.
Timeline
- 1907First Gadsden Hotel opens, designed by Trost and Trost
- 1926Bought by Franklin O. and Mrs. Mackey
- 1928Hotel destroyed by fire in February
- 1929Fireproof rebuilt hotel opens
- 1962Thornton Wilder's two-month stay
- 1976Listed on the National Register
- 2013–2014Lobby floor and second-floor rooms renovated
Where sources differ
- The nomination credits Tiffany's with the stained-glass mural, designed by an El Paso artist it names 'Audrey Jean Nichols'; Wikipedia attributes the window to Ralph Baker and an oil painting below it to Audley Dean Nicols. The Tiffany attribution is doubtful.
- The nomination describes the lobby columns as pink marble; Wikipedia calls the marble white.
- Ghost stories about Room 333 are legend.
