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HOTEL IN ST. LOUIS c. 1870-1885
The Park Hotel was not immune to these changes, and 1961 marked the end of both the famous baths and the even more famous duckling dinners. Family health problems, coupled with growing financial losses, forced Grant Hess to close the dining room. He reopened it for Mother's Day, May 14. Meals were served from noon to 7 p.m. to a record number of patrons, some assuming perhaps that this would be the last time the Park's dining room would be open and wishing to cement a memory of dinner at the Park. But service was exceedingly slow that day, and the memories were not necessarily good ones. Later the dining room was opened for a short time by Mary Burgard after which it was closed for good. Grant ceased his affiliation with the hotel. He suffered a stroke in September. Walt lived in the hotel and continued to rent rooms. Chef Stan Binkowski moved to Mt. Pleasant and opened Stan's Restaurant. Frank Housel retired from his position as manager. The closing of the dining room meant that permanent guests had to find meals elsewhere. Some left the hotel; a few remained. The building was in sad need of repair; the wooden trim needed restoration, large verandah sagged. The Hesses had torn down the outbuildings in the late 40's. When Walt Hess died in January, 1964, the end seemed to be in sight. If the Park Hotel's days were numbered, they were not quite over, nor was the hotel to die unnoticed and unmourned. Grant Hess, as administrator of his father's estate, kept the building open as long as it paid its way. But soon it was not doing even this. In late February, 1966, he closed the Park forever. With its doors locked and front windows boarded, it stood a sad derelict, its former glory shrouded in age and decay. The hotel was not closed a year before it was purchased from the Hess estate by Alfred Fortino and Thomas Cavanaugh, two St. Louis men who owned and operated a variety of properties through their American Apartment and Stores Corporation. They had held the mortgage on the property for more than a year. When asked about their plans for the property, Fortino explained that
they were open to suggestions. "We hope somebody will come up with
a good way to put it to work," he said. "We are going to do
something. We aren't just going to let it set there." Al Fortino suggested that the building might be renovated and rented to the county for office space, since several offices in Ithaca were in need of larger accommodations. Clarence Smazel, editor of the St. Louis Leader-Press, supported Fortino editorially, touching off a skirmish of words with the Alma Record which scoffed at the idea of moving the offices from their central location in Ithaca. While this verbal battle continued, the committee declared a need to talk with the fire marshal! and an architect. It was suggested that a restaurant be opened first before rehabilitating the entire hotel. A liquor license —a first for the Park — was considered a requirement for the proposed restaurant. Above all, the committee conceived of the project as an area undertaking, not merely as an attempt to promote the fortunes of St. Louis. Alma and Ithaca, however, did not conceive of the proposals as an area
undertaking, and it was soon clear that very little encouragement would
be forthcoming from any outside source. Even more discouraging was the
report that since the hotel was in extreme disrepair, a huge expenditure
would be required to put it back into operation. And that money was not
available. For several days the crane continued to chew into the old building, exposing one by one the hotel rooms, the lobby, the dining room. Crashing cascades of shingles and beams, plaster and lath, flooring and window casings continued to pile up day by day, only to be trucked away. Gradually the hotel disappeared, opening to observers a vista of the Pine River not seen for nearly a century. By March, 1968, the site of the Park Hotel was an empty, graded lot with an IGA store slated to be built at the location. Clearly, the Park Hotel did not die without a fight. Nevertheless, it was a victim of those social and economic forces afoot in America that have doomed architecturally and historically significant buildings by the hundreds. The Park exists now in a few scattered articles, photos, and documents—and in a host of memories. Those memories. They are made up of thousands of lives and more thousands of experiences. They include those people who checked in and then disappeared. They include those who died under mysterious circumstances. They include Jim Sumner's dog Queenie who entered the dining room, snatched a table cloth and pulled a freshly-served meal to the floor. They include the Alma College Homecoming celebration that got out of hand with Walt Hess reporting $700 in damages. They include the worn front steps that were not replaced, according to Roy Bortles, because they showed the great number of people who had gone through the portals of the Park. But even the memories are fading. In the early years hundreds of people traveled to a backwoods village seeking miracles at a primitive mineral well. With the building of the hotel in 1880 the mineral spring took on respectability. And with the fading of the popularity of the baths, the famed duckling dinners drew diners by the hundreds. The Saratoga of the West had a long and varied history, a history that deserves to be remembered.
1. Park Hotel Unlike Willis and Mary Andrews, some people who were intimately connected with the Park Hotel did not live out their years there. James R. Stafford died in his elegant Main Street home October 2, 1940, at age 86. Harriet Stafford sold the house to the Wolfgang Funeral Home, and she went to live with her children. When she died on March 3, 1945, her funeral was held from the house where she and Jim once had lived. The Huntleys eventually returned to the East. Jim Sumner, Sr., was heading to California by train when he suffered a heart attack and died in Tucson, Arizona. "Little Jim" Stafford, who lived in the hotel perhaps longer than anyone, died at the Schnepp Nursing Home in St. Louis. Discovering and recording the history of the Magnetic Mineral Spring and the Park Hotel has been fun. It has not been easy, but it definitely has been fun. Pulling together such an aggregation of information requires one to be both sleuth and slave — and sometimes exuberant discoverer. It involves countless dry, musty pages of century-old newspapers, hours of reading microfilmed newspapers, scores of telephone calls, a myriad of letters, the examination of documents and photographs, and—most pleasantly—personal visits with some wonderful people. It raises the frustration level, too, when that elusive fact lurks nearby and can't quite be captured, or when two "facts" are clearly contradictory. Still, it is fun. My memories are not so much of the Spring and Hotel. The memories are of those individuals who said, "Well, I don't know if I can help you very much, but, come on over." So the memories accumulate visit by visit. The pleasant summer afternoon spent with Helen Stafford Brainard in her sun-porch—just months before her death—as she recalled details no one else would know. The generosity of George Healy who meticulously mapped and remapped the hotel and its environs—and with marvelous detail recalled his boyhood days there. The chat with Bob Wilson who claimed he couldn't recall much but kept remembering more and more. The cool summer morning spent with Jim Sumner, Jr., on the front porch of his daughter's home in Alma and the little old lady who came along and interrupted us and wouldn't go away. The afternoon when Milt Townsend and I ended up discussing what to do about the raccoons and woodchucks in our gardens. The generosity of Vesta Hess as she entrusted to me her photographs and collection of printed material on the hotel. The delightful Helen Ostrander Albert who produced a treasure trove of St. Louis photographs as well as intriguing information on the town. And visits to other wonderful folks. And then there were the unexpected discoveries. It was on exciting day
when I first laid eyes on the files of the Gratiot Journal in the living
room of Vere and Margaret Allen of Ithaca. These old newspapers, carefully
kept in Margaret's family for decades, transported county history from
1884 back to 1873 and provided a unique, detailed account of an extraordinary
decade in the growth of Gratiot County, a decade described nowhere else.
As I read through more than 600 issues of the Journal, railroads arrived,
logs floated down the Pine River, homes and This book was already at the printer's when an unexpected call from Judy Andrews, great-granddaughter of Dr. Willis P. Andrews, provided some additional information and established a contact with that family. So thank-you to those named and to the others who helped. Dorothy Marzolf generously provided much information and numerous photographs after the death of her mother Helen Brainard. The late Bill Keon recalled interesting details of life in the hotel, details gleaned from his many years as an employee. Lucille Behler provided many of the photographs from her collection and carefully copied those loaned by others. Helen Hall produced mineral water bottles as a tangible reminder of days long gone. And a thank-you note to all those included in the list of sources and any inadvertently omitted. Without you all, this book would never have happened. David McMacken
THE END Last Updated August 22, 2006 |
