Resort hotel · West Baden Springs, Indiana · Built 1901–1902; atrium remodeled 1917–1919
West Baden Springs Hotel
A circular six-story spa hotel built in 1901–02 for banker Lee Sinclair, its atrium roofed by a steel-and-glass dome about 200 feet across, the largest in the world when built; later a Jesuit seminary and a college.
History
John A. Lane opened an inn at the Mile Lick springs, a mile north of French Lick, in the early 1850s, and when the settlement took the name West Baden, after the German spa, the hotel followed. Lee W. Sinclair, a banker from Salem, Indiana, owned it when it burned on June 14, 1901. Sinclair wanted a fireproof replacement crowned by the biggest dome on earth. Several architects told him it could not be done; Harrison Albright, a young architect from Charleston, West Virginia, took the job, with the bridge engineer Oliver J. Westcott designing the dome. Built with stone foundations, concrete floors and steel lath, the new hotel opened on September 15, 1902.
Guests came for the Sprudel water, a double-decked covered track for cycling and riding with a baseball field inside, an opera house, a stock brokerage and casinos nearby. Paul Dresser is said to have written "On the Banks of the Wabash" during a stay, major league clubs trained here, and Al Capone came with bodyguards in the 1920s. After Sinclair died in 1916, his daughter Lillian Rexford had the atrium remodeled, and the hotel served as an Army hospital in 1918–19. In 1922 or 1923 she sold to Ed Ballard, a local gambling and circus magnate, who closed the hotel in June 1932.
In 1934 Ballard gave the building to the Jesuits, who ran it as a seminary for thirty years and stripped its showier ornament. Northwood Institute used it as a campus until 1983. Entangled in bankruptcy, it was closed as unsafe in 1989, and in 1991 part of an exterior wall collapsed. Indiana Landmarks and Bill and Gayle Cook's company stabilized and restored it from 1996, and it reopened as a hotel on June 23, 2007.
“Although later outstripped in size by other types of domes, including reinforced and geodesic structures, the West Baden Springs Hotel dome may still be the largest of its type in the world.”
Architecture
The hotel is a sixteen-sided brick and concrete ring six stories high, with two concentric rings of rooms on every floor around a full-height atrium known as the Pompeian Court. Twenty-four steel ribs span the court, meeting at a plate drum at the crown and resting on roller shoes atop the outer walls so the dome could expand and contract. The nomination calls the style an 'Olympian combination' rather than a single idiom. The 1917–19 work added marble wainscot, a mosaic floor of small marble squares, canvas-wrapped and painted columns, and a fireplace faced in Rookwood tile. The Jesuits removed Byzantine-style towers and the scalloped parapet. South of the hotel, brick pavilions of the late 1910s, including the Apollo and Hygeia temples, frame a formal sunken garden.
What to look for
- The atrium dome and its 24 radiating steel ribs
- Mosaic marble floor of the Pompeian Court
- Rookwood-tiled atrium fireplace
- Brick spring temples around the sunken garden
- Sixteen-sided outer wall seen from the grounds
Setting
The hotel sits on rolling ground at the head of the Springs Valley, in the small town of West Baden Springs, with forested hills on every side. Its formal garden and spring pavilions lie to the south, and French Lick Springs Hotel, the old rival, is a mile down State Road 56.
Timeline
- c. 1852John A. Lane opens the Mile Lick inn
- 1901Old hotel burns on June 14
- 1902Domed hotel opens on September 15
- 1917–1919Atrium remodeled; Army hospital in 1918–19
- 1932Ed Ballard closes the hotel
- 1934Given to the Jesuits as a seminary
- 2007Restored hotel reopens on June 23
Where sources differ
- The nomination gives the dome as 195 feet in diameter in its description and 200 feet in its significance statement.
- The nomination dates the sale to Ed Ballard to 1922; Wikipedia gives 1923.
- The story that Paul Dresser wrote 'On the Banks of the Wabash' at the hotel is repeated in the nomination but is a local tradition.
