Hotel · Newport, Oregon · Built 1913
Hotel Sylvia (Sylvia Beach Hotel)
Listed on the National Register as New Cliff House
A shingled Craftsman resort hotel of 1913 on the bluff above Nye Beach in Newport, the last survivor of the railroad-era hotels there; long the Gilmore Hotel, it reopened in 1987 with rooms themed on famous authors.
History
The Oregon Pacific Railroad reached Yaquina Bay from Corvallis in 1885, meant to make Newport a great seaport. The port never came, but the line, later part of the Southern Pacific, carried Willamette Valley families to the beach, and from the 1890s a resort grew north along Nye Beach with hotels, cottages, a bathhouse and a sanitorium. In 1913 W. D. Wheeler built the New Cliff House on the bluff, replacing a small boarding house called the Cliff House, and by 1915 the railroad's brochure listed it among a dozen Newport hotels, with hot and cold water in every room from two dollars a day. Wikipedia adds that it drew guests partly because liquor could be had there, unusual in a largely dry region.
In 1921 Wheeler traded the hotel to Peter Gilmore for his chicken ranch nearby, and as the Gilmore Hotel it ran under that name for decades, while its rivals, the Abbey and the Nicolai, disappeared along with the sanitorium and bathhouse. Sometime before 1935 a new lobby and entrance were added on the north side. By the mid-1980s the building stood empty and vandalized under a caretaker. New owners, Goody Cable and Sally Ford, with the architect Aron Faegre, who prepared the National Register nomination, rehabilitated it, and the hotel was listed in November 1986. It reopened on March 14, 1987, the centenary of the Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach, as the Sylvia Beach Hotel, each room dedicated to an author, with a library on the top floor; it was later renamed Hotel Sylvia.
“Its oceanfront location and siting on unusually solid, concrete footings are reasons contributing to the survival of the New Cliff House to the present day.”
Architecture
The hotel is L-shaped, about 80 by 30 feet with a smaller projection, under intersecting gable roofs, one higher than the other. On the street it stands three stories; the bluff falls away so the ocean front rises four. The walls are uniformly covered in sixteen-inch shingles, banded by a water table and foot-wide belt courses at each floor. Wide exposed rafters give the eaves a slight flare, and large triangular knee braces with chamfered ends carry the bargeboards. Windows are plain one-over-one sash, one to a room regardless of view. Inside, the original corridor plan, staircase, wainscoting and dark-stained fir trim largely survived, and the foundation is two-foot-thick concrete laid with large stones.
What to look for
- Flared eaves with exposed rafter ends
- Large knee braces under the gables
- Shingle walls banded by belt courses
- The four-story ocean side dropping down the bluff
- The top-floor library looking over the Pacific
Setting
The hotel stands at NW Cliff and NW 3rd streets on a bluff directly above Nye Beach, surrounded by shingled cottages of the old resort district. Paths lead down to the sand, and the Newport Visual Arts Center is across the street. Yaquina Bay, its bridge and the working harbor lie about a mile south.
Timeline
- 1885Railroad reaches Yaquina Bay from Corvallis
- 1913New Cliff House built for W. D. Wheeler
- 1921Traded to Peter Gilmore and renamed the Gilmore Hotel
- 1986Listed on the National Register on November 6
- 1987Reopens as the Sylvia Beach Hotel on March 14
Where sources differ
- The claim that alcohol availability helped the hotel's early popularity comes from Wikipedia and is not in the nomination.
- The date of the later rename to Hotel Sylvia is not given in the sources.
