Hotel Sherman
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Booklet courtesy of Richard Blacher.
Comments and pictures by Paul Jackson.
A Little Journey to the Hotel Sherman
By Elbert Hubbard, 1915
This booklet measures 8" x 6" and has 15 numbered pages. The Sherman Hotel was a very famous hotel and one of Chicago's hottest night spots from 1910 through the 1920s. There is more information on the Sherman Hotel located below:
Jazz Age Chicago
The Hotel Sherman
The Hotel Sherman was
one of the city's premier hotels and a leading night-life venue during much of
the early twentieth century. The hotel's origins, however, date back to 1837. In
that year, Francis C. Sherman, a three-time mayor of Chicago and father of the
legendary Civil War general, opened the City Hotel on the north side of Randolph
Street between Clark and LaSalle. The hotel, renamed the Sherman House in 1844,
measured a mere 18 by 84 feet.
The venerable Sherman House endured many changes over the years, not the least
of which was the great fire of 1871, when the hotel burned to the ground
alongside the rest of downtown. Quickly rebuilt, the new structure was larger
and more elaborately decorated than its predecessor. By the turn of the century,
however, the Sherman House began to lose its luster and popularity. Gradually,
it gained the reputation as the "deadest hotel" in town.
Not until the hotel was acquired by entrepreneur Joseph Beifeld was its decline
reversed. Beifeld, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, dramatically improved the
hotel's image with the help of first-class customer service and top-flight
entertainment in the evenings. By 1904, the new and improved Hotel Sherman and
its famed restaurant, the College Inn, were the talk of the town, increasingly
frequented by local celebrities and members of high society.
Buoyed
by the turnaround, Beifeld invested several million dollars in new construction
at the hotel. In 1911, the main hotel structure was rebuilt, followed by an
additional $7 million, twenty-three-story expansion in 1925. By the end of the
1920s, the Hotel Sherman contained 1600 guest rooms, a banquet hall seating
2500, and stunning new marble lobby. Local newspapers reported that the new
facilities made the Sherman the largest hotel west of New York City.
Incidentally, soon after his
purchase of the Sherman, Beifeld joined two other entertainment entrepreneurs,
Aaron Jones and Paul Howse, in another major entertainment venture. With
Beifeld's significant financial assistance, Jones and Howse proceeded with their
plans to open the Midwest's largest amusement park, named White City, on
Chicago's South Side. Beifeld served as president of the amusement park, which
received its first guests in the summer of 1905.
The Hotel Sherman remained one of Chicago's premier night spots through the
1910s and 1920s, attracting celebrities, tourists, and members of high society.
It was during this period that the College Inn restaurant, with the help of band
leader Isham Jones, became a notable jazz venue. Jones broke with the genteel
tradition of violin-based hotel performance when he replaced many of his
orchestra's waltz-oriented numbers with new, jazz-inspired tunes. Though there
were critics of the change, most of the restaurant's patrons applauded the
livelier arrangements and the freer dance styles they encouraged.
Though the tunes played by Isham Jones and his all-white jazz orchestra were
tame in comparison to those heard in the racially mixed cabarets of the South
Side, they nonetheless gave many white Chicagoans their first taste of jazz. To
be sure, the College Inn was an especially important fixture in Chicago's
growing jazz scene. There, amid the refined surroundings of the Hotel Sherman,
jazz sounds migrated from the city's African-American neighborhoods into the
center of white society. For black musicians, however, the popularization of
jazz music among white Chicagoans was a mixed blessing, since discriminatory
hiring practices excluded them from joining the orchestras at the city's white
hotels. Hotel managers feared that patrons of venues like the College Inn would
object to listening and dancing to jazz music if it were performed by black
musicians.
After the Second World War, the Sherman retained its position as one of the
city's leading hotels, popular among visiting businessmen and conventioneers. In
time, however, the hotel began to show its age and had an increasingly difficult
time competing with newer hotels along Michigan Avenue and in the suburbs. In
January 1973, the hotel closed. At the time, it was the oldest hotel in
continuous operation in the state of Illinois. There were plans to remodel the
building into a fashion mart and build a replacement hotel at the corner of
Randolph and LaSalle, but nothing came of them. In 1980, the hotel was
demolished. Its site is now occupied by the Thompson Center, formerly known as
the State of Illinois Center.
Information and picture courtesy of:
Chicago Urban History.Org
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