Guide Line Review
The Brown Palace Hotel
Our host at the Brown Palace Hotel was Debra Faulkner, historian at the Brown Palace (one of three hotel historians in the US). Debra is also a professor of history at Metro State University and the author of seven books, the most recent of which is a history of Longmont, Colorado, Debra’s hometown, written with her mother. Two years ago, Debra released a book called “Ladies of the Brown: A Women’s History of Denver’s Most Elegant Hotel” which is about the powerful and well-known women who have stayed at the Brown Palace Hotel including Margaret Tobin Brown, Augusta Tabor, Emily Griffith, Edna Boettcher, Sarah Bernhardt, Helen Keller, Joan Baez, Mamie Eisenhower and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Brown Palace was built and owned by Henry Cortes Brown who arrived in Denver in 1860. He arrived in Denver with his wife and new baby. His wife Jane took one look at the mountains that must be crossed in order to go on the California and decided that Denver was as far as she was going. Henry was a builder and a real estate speculator and so he invested in Denver. The hotel is 120 years old and Denver in 2012 is 153 years old. It took four years to build the hotel at a cost of $2 million. The hotel opened on August 12, 1892. The hotel has always had electricity and its own generators in the basement. The water is supplied from two artesian wells below the hotel. The Brown is one of the first fireproof buildings. The superstructure is of iron, steel and concrete. Originally there were 318 rooms and the cost was between $3 and $5 a night. Every room is an outside room. The building is a right triangle shape which is suited to the lot. The downtown streets follow Cherry Creek and the later streets, such as those on Capitol Hill, follow the compass (N, S, E & W).
When the Homestead Act was passed, Henry bought 160 acres on the bluff for $200. This land was called Brown’s Bluff, now called Capitol Hill. When Henry developed Brown’s Bluff he wanted his residents to have a view of either the sunset or the sunrise so these houses face due East and West.
There are actually three restaurants on the main floor and the Coffee Shop where you can get great coffee and oversize pastries. First, there is Ellyngton’s – the breakfast and lunch restaurant which has been a restaurant since 1900 and features live music (hence the play on the name Ellington). Ellyngton’s was once called the San Marco room.
The Palace Arms restaurant features several items that belonged to Napoleon and date from the 1790s. The private dining room off the Palace Arms is called the Independence Room and it features wallpaper that shows 1834 impressions of colonial America. There are two other places in the world that have this wallpaper: The White House in Washington, DC and Versailles, France. This room originally was the grand entrance to the hotel but was closed in 1950 because the traffic was so dense that it was dangerous for hotel patrons to enter and exit in this location. So, the location for the entry was moved around the corner and this area became the Palace Arms.
The Ship’s Tavern is a lunch and dinner restaurant. It is the oldest of the three restaurants. It opened in 1934 with the current décor. When the Boettchers owned the hotel (1930 – 1980), Claude Boettcher bought many of the knick-knacks in the hotel on his travels. He bought the 15 ship models on one of these trips and intended to display them in his home. His wife had the brilliant idea that they would look so much better displayed in the new restaurant at the hotel and so that has been the home of the 15 ship models ever since.
We went upstairs on the escalators which are more modern than the original hotel. The elevators originally were cage elevators and they have been modernized since then to hold ten passengers.
The exterior of the hotel is of granite and sandstone which is very decorative. On the 7th floor there are 26 medallions done by James Whitehouse depicting native Colorado animals. Sandstone is not as durable as other stone so some of the details of the exterior have deteriorated over time.
Across 17th Street is the Navarre – a wonderful Western art museum. Originally this building was a boarding school, then became the Richelieu Hotel, then the Navarre which in the 1920s and 1930s was a brothel. There is evidence that there was a tunnel between the Navarre and the Brown Palace, probably used to transport coal between the buildings, however the story is that the patrons of the Brown Palace, who did not want to be seen entering the Navarre when it was a brothel, used this tunnel to go from the hotel to the Navarre unseen. The Navarre has been owned by the Anschutz family since 1997 and is now a great Western Art Museum and is open to the public.
Also across the street from the Brown Palace is the Comfort Inn, the most elegant Comfort Inn you can imagine. It is owned by the same company as the Brown and is used for overflow bookings in the hotel. The Comfort Inn opened in 1959 and guests get all the amenities of the Brown Palace but not the price.
On the second floor of the Brown is the Brown Palace Club, now used as a private dining/meeting room. In 1952, Dwight David Eisenhower used it for his campaign headquarters in his run for the presidency. In 1963 it was opened as the Brown Palace Club for gentlemen only and in the 1970s women staged a sit-in and it now is open to women as well.
We went out into the atrium and looked up at the stained glass skylight in the center. The décor is Italian renaissance with decorative wrought iron panels on each floor from the 3rd through the 7th floors. On the fourth and fifth floors there are panels that were installed upside down – probably so that the building would not be too perfect. As we looked across the lobby we were shown the spa entrance which used to be a huge fireplace.
High tea is served almost every afternoon at the Brown. To start the holiday season, there is an event called the Champagne Cascade on a non-Bronco home game Sunday. Six thousand glasses are set out in a pyramid and champagne poured into the top glasses and it cascades down the pyramid. Debra says that there have been no mishaps in over 25 years.
We then went to the Onyx Room (or Grand Salon) which has wainscoting from Mexico in golden onyx. On the ceiling is a mural of muscular cherubs floating in the sky. Each of the cherubs has the face of someone known to the artist – including himself and his son.
We then went to the 9th floor which was added in the 1920s and used as private apartments until the 1950s. This floor is Art Deco design and was called the Skyline Apartments. Now these apartments have been converted to executive suites. Debra told us of a paranormal experience she had in one of these apartments. The occupant, Eleanor Blackmer, lived in this apartment for 31 years and did not care for strangers. Ms. Blackmer died at the Brown Palace where at the end of her life she had round-the-clock nurses. When Debra was new to the hotel, she went into this apartment to turn on the lights so that she could show it to visitors. She went back to get the visitors and when she re-entered the apartment, all the lampshades had been set askew. Ms. Blackmer did not care for strangers.
These 9th floor suites are Presidential suites – one is decorated in Mission style and is called the Reagan Suite. We visited the Teddy Roosevelt Suite which is done in dark woods in a 1911-1919 style. This suite was the apartment that had the lampshade ghost. The view from this suite is of 17th and Broadway. This suite can be as expensive as $2250/night though most executives who stay here are not paying this much because they are probably using catering facilities or private dining rooms as well.
The rooms on the 3rd through the 7th floors are Victorian in style and generally go for $150 - $400/night. The VIP list of guests is very long and includes almost every big star of “stage, screen and radio” from the 1940s and 1950s. The Beatles stayed at the Brown Palace in 1964 on their American tour. Debra said there were hundreds of housekeeping applications during that period from girls trying to get to see or meet the Beatles.
At the end of our tour we viewed the Allen True murals in the lobby from the 1930s, done as part of the WPA. They are above the elevators which prompted Debra to tell us another unusual experience she has had in the hotel. She and another person were on the 9th floor and heard a baby crying loudly, they entered the elevator, the doors closed and as they rode down the baby cried just as loudly until they reached the third floor where there was a whoosh or air and the crying stopped. Strange happenings!!!!
--- Nancy Brueggeman
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Brown Palace Hotel
WHAT: RMGA MEETING
WHEN: Monday, January 14, 2013
WHERE: Brown Palace Hotel, 321 Seventeenth Street, Denver, Colorado 80202
PROGRAM: Tour of the Brown Palace Hotel – Debra Faulkner – hotel historian, author of seven books and Professor of History at Metro State as well as RMGA member.