The Hotel Majestic: Philadelphia's Lost Marvel
September 3, 2023 6:42 AM Subscribe
The story of a long lost hotel told through newspapers, postcards, and tin plates. What little remains of its once great presence leaves a lot to the imagination about what it might have been like to stay in the luxurious 1920s hotel.
That’s a lovely bit of research! If you want to spend the $$$$ to imagine this more fully, the US Grant hotel in San Diego is of a similar vintage, and has repeatedly been the center point of historical events in this city. In a town with no real city hall it (and the park across the street) stand in for symbols of power, history and influence. Now owned by the Sycuan band of the Kumeyaay nation, which is a fairly satisfying development for a hotel founded by the son of a US President.
posted by q*ben at 8:50 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by q*ben at 8:50 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
We have a hotel of this vintage in Spokane -- the Davenport Hotel. It really is one of those buildings that draws gasps of surprise when I take visitors in there. It has some nice restaurants and I hear the rooms are lovely. I guess it has a Presidential Suite because when Teddy Rosevelt came to town to break ground for the Masonic Temple here, another really amazing building, he stayed in the Davenport.
posted by hippybear at 9:19 AM on September 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by hippybear at 9:19 AM on September 3, 2023 [1 favorite]
@hippybear I've mostly stayed at the Davenport Grand. I think maybe once I stayed at the historic Davenport, but that was a long time ago. Spokane in general has a lot of interesting architecture! I personally love the Parkade. And the company I work with used to be headquartered out of 421 Riverside, which made a cameo in that Macklemore video.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:31 AM on September 3, 2023
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:31 AM on September 3, 2023
I love 421 Riverside. The site of the first elevators in Spokane, and they were piston driven with glass doors on the ground floor. People used to congregate on the street and watch the elevator pistons run when they were first installed.
posted by hippybear at 9:34 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 9:34 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
That was my subway stop for high school, and if anything the KFC and Checkers have spruced up the place. Back then, my relatives would tell me it used to be a nice neighborhood, and you could see it if you squinted at the brownstones, but holy cow nobody told me about the Majestic! What a loss. Temple should have snapped that up.
posted by whuppy at 11:27 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by whuppy at 11:27 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]
After riding the regional rail into Philadelphia for a couple of years, we moved into the city at 12th and Poplar, and I used to catch the Broad Street Line at Girard Station daily. It sure was an adjustment. My first time down there, I didn't have a token (this is 2009... SEPTA was one of the last transit agencies to get rid of tokens), and there weren't token machines, and when I presented a $20 to the person behind the counter, they cautioned me, "No change." Yikes! I went up the stairs to the gas station across the street and asked for change. "No change." I mean, looking around, I get it. So I picked up a pack of gum, and the gas station checkout guy shook his head, "Nope." He wouldn't let me buy a pack of gum to get change. By now, I'm close to being late to work, and losing my patience, so I walk to the attached McDonalds and ask what the cheapest thing on the menu is. "Need change for the subway? I gotchu" said the woman behind the counter at McDonalds. Welcome to Philadelphia! Not long after moving there, we thought we'd give the KFC a try, and the drive-through window had the thickest bullet-proof plexiglass I've ever seen, and a whole one-way-at-a-time exchange mechanism for passing in money and getting back food, and the food wasn't great. That corner felt bombed out, but there's a ton of pedestrian traffic. In the years I lived nearby and took the Broad Street Line I never felt unsafe.
It's so hard to imagine a building like this being on the corner, or that it was once someone's place for building a mansion, but over the last decade, North Broad has seen an infusion of developer attention, both coming down from Temple and coming up from City Hall.
Anyway, what I really came here to say is that I identify with this hyperlocal historian stuff. A few years ago now, we moved across town into an old building and found a bunch of 18th century artifacts during renovation (it's a long story, we recorded a podcast about it, called The Boghouse), and I fell down the rabbit hole of learning about my neighborhood. Mostly we learned about the material culture we unearthed, and learning about the people who were there when it was discarded, but it's been fun tracking down images of the neighborhood over the centuries, and spending $20 here and there on eBay for ephemera from businesses and buildings nearby, most of which are buried under I-95. I've got a watch fob and stationary from the 1890s celebrating the building that a merchant moved into, that I found from a very specific keyword search, in great condition, for less than a cheap dinner for two.
It's really humbling to see things like this - someone's so successful in their ventures that they commission swag, or build a mansion on a main street in town, and a century later... you'd almost never know it. Good post!
posted by Leviathant at 12:43 PM on September 3, 2023 [7 favorites]
It's so hard to imagine a building like this being on the corner, or that it was once someone's place for building a mansion, but over the last decade, North Broad has seen an infusion of developer attention, both coming down from Temple and coming up from City Hall.
Anyway, what I really came here to say is that I identify with this hyperlocal historian stuff. A few years ago now, we moved across town into an old building and found a bunch of 18th century artifacts during renovation (it's a long story, we recorded a podcast about it, called The Boghouse), and I fell down the rabbit hole of learning about my neighborhood. Mostly we learned about the material culture we unearthed, and learning about the people who were there when it was discarded, but it's been fun tracking down images of the neighborhood over the centuries, and spending $20 here and there on eBay for ephemera from businesses and buildings nearby, most of which are buried under I-95. I've got a watch fob and stationary from the 1890s celebrating the building that a merchant moved into, that I found from a very specific keyword search, in great condition, for less than a cheap dinner for two.
It's really humbling to see things like this - someone's so successful in their ventures that they commission swag, or build a mansion on a main street in town, and a century later... you'd almost never know it. Good post!
posted by Leviathant at 12:43 PM on September 3, 2023 [7 favorites]
If you want to see how Philadelphia changed over time, the Philadelphia GeoHistory Site is an amazing resource. It's a map with overlays of all of the surveys done since 1750.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:25 AM on September 4, 2023
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:25 AM on September 4, 2023
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posted by grumpybear69 at 8:33 AM on September 3, 2023 [1 favorite]