West Baden Springs Hotel
The West Baden Springs Hotel is a historic landmark hotel in the town of West Baden Springs in Orange County, Indiana, USA, known for its vast domed atrium. It is currently part of the French Lick Resort Casino complex. Prior to the completion of the Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1963, the building had the largest free-spanning dome in the United States and was the largest in the world from 1902 to 1913.
A group that included Lee Wiley Sinclair from Salem, Indiana acquired controlling interest in the hotel in 1888. Sinclair soon became sole owner and transformed it into a sophisticated resort, including an opera house, a casino—advertised as “The Carlsbad of America” and a two-deck, covered, one-third-mile oval bicycle and pony track. A lighted baseball diamond in the center of the track became the spring training grounds for several major league teams including the Cincinnati Reds, Chicago White Sox, Chicago Cubs and Pittsburgh Pirates. Fire destroyed the entire hotel building in less than two hours in June, 1901; however, no guests were injured. Owner Lee Sinclair declared that the new hotel would be fireproof and would have the world’s largest dome. Most professionals in the architectural community considered it impossible, but unknown West Virginia architect Harrison Albright completed the new West Baden Springs Hotel on time.
The new structure opened in September 1902 and if the advertisements and articles about the new hotel were true, the facility deserved being called the Eighth Wonder of the World. It was claimed that the resort’s mineral baths and drinking waters could cure everything from sterility to senility. The hotel’s amenities included two golf courses, billiards, bowling, baseball, swimming, horseback riding, bicycling and hiking on scenic trails, movies and nightly theatre. On-site personal services included a stock brokerage, banking and a barbershop. Birds flew freely in the 200-foot-diameter atrium, and an enormous fireplace burned 14-foot logs to take the chill off on cool evenings.
Vacant after 1983, the building slipped into extreme decay, resulting in the collapse of a good portion of the west wall in 1991. In 1992, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the hotel as one of America’s most endangered places. Bill Cook, a Bloomington, Indiana, entrepreneur and billionaire, financed a partial restoration of the property by the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana which assumed ownership in 1996. It was marketed nationally for almost ten years without a buyer and over 400,000 visitors toured the hotel.
In 2006, title was transferred to a subsidiary of Bill Cook’s Cook Group to become a part of the French Lick Resort Casino development. In May 2007, the building began hosting guests as a hotel in 246 luxury rooms for the first time since 1932. In 2009, AAA recognized the hotel as one of the top 10 U.S. historic hotels.
http://www.frenchlick.com/aboutUs/history/wbsh.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Baden_Springs_Hotel
