Somerset Hotel - Hotel Roosevelt, Chicago Illinois

Date added: August 01, 2024

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Designed by Jules De Horvath and constructed in 1892-1893, Chicago's eight-story Romanesque Revival style Somerset Hotel is an example of late-nineteenth-century high-rise Chicago residential hotels. Constructed during the building boom that preceded the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the Somerset Hotel shared common architectural elements with a broad spectrum of Chicago hotel, office, and apartment buildings. Although he trained as an architect in Paris, France, De Horvath adopted the precedents and formal motifs of Chicago buildings for his Somerset Hotel design. He attended closely to the work of Clinton J. Warren, Chicago's most notable late-nineteenth-century hotel designer, who, like De Horvath, worked for Burnham & Root during the 1880s. The Somerset Hotel stood as one of the notable buildings that formed the hotel and retail district which developed between two important South Side rail stations. The 12^th Street station of the new South Side elevated line stood seventy feet west of the Somerset Hotel. The main terminal of Illinois Central Railroad was constructed in the early 1890s on a site one and one half blocks east of the hotel. Many of the hotels and shops built in this once bustling district have been demolished, along with the Illinois Central Railroad Station itself. The Somerset Hotel accommodated people of more modest means. Unlike late-nineteenth-century boarding houses that often provided makeshift accommodations in sub-divided dwelling houses, residential hotels offered a higher level of amenities, including hot and cold running water, indoor toilets, steam heat, electricity, and fairly high levels of natural light.

The Somerset Hotel project originated in March, 1892 when Dr. Frank M. Stringfield, a Chicago physician, leased from Walter L. Peck the 50 foot by 100 foot plot of land at the northwest corner of Wabash Avenue and Twelfth Street. Born in Philadelphia, Stringfield had worked as a war correspondent for the Washington Star during the Civil War. On April 14^th, 1865 Stringfield was in the audience in Ford's Theater when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Stringfield later moved to Kansas and became a leader of the Democratic party, getting its nomination for governor in 1880. When he lost the election he moved to Chicago. Stringfield lived in Chicago residential hotels, including the Kimball Hotel during the 1890s, and in 1903 he died in his apartment at Chicago's Kaiserhof Hotel. As part of his development for the Somerset Hotel, Stringfield agreed to pay Peck an annual ground rent of $6,000 and to build, within one year, a brick and stone building costing at least $100,000.

Stringfield's lease would run for a period of 99 years; at the end of the term the building was to revert to Peck's heirs. In reviewing real estate and building developments for 1892 the Chicago Tribune noted the importance of leasehold transactions and included the Stringfield and Peck deal among its list of important recent transactions. The Tribune reported, "Only a few years ago a ninety-nine-year lease was a rather unique transaction, never heard of outside of the downtown district … Some of the most important downtown transactions were of this nature and a large majority of the apartment-house projects of the year were based on leasehold interests." Despite the fact that the leasehold system permitted the developer to concentrate available money on building, Stringfield experienced considerable financial problems in building the Somerset Hotel. In June 1893, the contractor, the stone and brick supplier, the electrical contractor, and others involved in the construction went to court to sue Stringfield, placing mechanics liens on the property. Stringfield was forced to surrender his interest in the property and a series of hotel owners and proprietors operated the hotel; in 1946 Walter Peck's heirs sold their leasehold to the Hotel Roosevelt Corporation, which had operated the hotel for over 25 years.

When Frank Stringfield and Jules De Horvath applied for a building permit in June, 1892, they listed the kind of building as "apartments." Their designation underscores an important ambiguity in the language during Chicago's early period of innovation and experimentation with high-rise residential building types. As the residential terminology gained stability, "apartments" came to mean a building with multiple units, each of which had a kitchen. There is no evidence that Stringfield ever planned separate units with kitchens for the Somerset Hotel. Similar ambiguity characterizes the early name of the Somerset. The first name given the project was the "Stringfield Building," in the "Notable Chicago Buildings" section in the Chicago Daily News Almanac For 1893. It is unlikely that the building was ever know as the Stringfield Building because Stringfield's connection with the hotel apparently ended prior to the opening. Another published name for the hotel appeared in the 1898 Rand, McNally & Company's Bird's-Eye Views and Guide to Chicago. The guide listed the building name "The Martinette Hotel." However, this name does not seem certain since the Martinette does not appear in any other source, including Chicago city directories. The Somerset name continued in use until 1910 when the building was renamed the Mayer Hotel. The Mayer name was in use through the early 1920s when the name was changed to Hotel Roosevelt, a name that has continued in use to the present.

Architecturally, the most striking model for De Horvath's high-rise design was the ten-story Virginia Hotel, designed in 1888 by Clinton J. Warren at the northwest corner of Ohio and Rush streets. The Virginia Hotel included a substantial lobby, public reception rooms and parlors, a billiards room, a bowling alley, and large restaurants. Despite these hotel-like features, the Virginia's upper floors were divided into 54 suites, all of which included kitchens. Thus there were substantial distinctions between the interior space and appointments of the luxurious Virginia Hotel and Stringfield's much more modest Somerset Hotel. For De Horvath the primary importance of the Virginia Hotel was that it provided a model for the Somerset Hotel's high-rise form and for its exterior design. Both exteriors included stone first stories and brick upper floors, projecting bays on all floors but the first and the top, single tiers of windows flanking the projecting bays, arched windows on the top floor, intricate brickwork cornices, unadorned and uninterrupted wall planes on leading corner of the side elevation, boldly projecting stone stringcourses at the level of the sills that balanced the vertical lines of the projecting bays, and both buildings had their overall mass broken by narrow street-facing light courts. The projecting window bays gave these elevations their dynamic quality. The Virginia Hotel's oriel bays, with their three windows, contrasted with the Somerset Hotel's segmental bays, which have only two windows. Despite the contrast, even the Somerset Hotel's segmental bays enjoyed a precedent in the Virginia; the Virginia's side elevation included one segmental bay that extended, above the side entrance, from the second through the sixth floor.

More general high-rise models for the elevation of the Somerset Hotel included Burnham & Root's Pickwick Apartments, on Michigan Avenue, completed in 1886, and the firm's Great Northern Hotel, northeast corner of Dearborn Avenue and Jackson Boulevard and the Ashland Block, northeast corner of Clark and Randolph streets, which were completed in 1892. All three of these buildings used projecting segmental bays. Also, Clinton Warren's treatment of the Metropole Hotel (1891), northeast corner Michigan Avenue and 23^rd Street, the Lexington Hotel (1892), northeast corner Michigan Avenue and Cermak Road, and the Plaza Hotel (1892), southeast corner Clark Street and North Avenue, shared the general form and architectural treatment that is today apparent in the Somerset Hotel design. The projecting bays proved an important way for developers who were increasing the mass and density of their residential and office buildings to increase light, ventilation, and floor area. The designs also attempted to grapple with broad-based, and at times strident, critique of multiple-family and high-rise buildings. The bays and the stringcourses countered the verticality of the building mass and created a varied set of elevations incorporating elements of contemporary domestic architecture, with its turreted and bay-windowed forms. The form, massing, and general residential character of these buildings constituted, in the late nineteenth century, the distinctive characteristics of a type and period. Unfortunately, as a group that shared a distinct architectural history, these buildings have also shared a distinct urban and housing history; with the exception of the Somerset Hotel they were all demolished in the twentieth century.

Leander McCormick, made wealthy through his family's manufacture of reapers, built the Virginia Hotel. When he took up residence in the building he helped neutralize the stigma that had been associated with apartment and hotel living. In 1891 the editors of Industrial Chicago argued that the economic depression of the 1870s had "banished the idea of a permanent home from many hearts." Apartment buildings took the place of small homes by grouping between ten and forty units under one roof. Reflecting contemporary cultural concerns, the editors inquired: "What if the flat would destroy home life?" Similar questions dogged apartment designers and profoundly shaped apartment and hotel design. Architectural historians Carroll William Westfall has summed up the problem confronting Chicago residents: "Although the house became less practicable for the lives they found themselves living, they continued to equate the house with home. The result was a conundrum: civil manners forbade what utility required." The prominence, popularity, and prestige of McCormick's Virginia Hotel inspired considerable emulation; luxury apartment buildings as well as buildings for people of more modest means began to rise on both the North and the South sides.

The Somerset Hotel's architectural borrowing of the Virginia model aimed, perhaps, to appropriate something of the Virginia Hotel's prestige but its accommodations were aimed at an altogether different class of people. An 1898 newspaper notice declared that the Somerset Hotel provided "nicely furnished rooms" for $1.50-$2.00 per week. It included "free bath, elevator, steam heat, hot and cold water in every room." The notice celebrated the hotel's central location with the pithy phrase "short walk." In June, 1900, when the United States census enumerator visited the Somerset Hotel he found 82 people in residence. Roberta P. Zimmerman, the 49 year old, Virginia-born, hotel keeper, lived there with her three sons, Thomas, Walter, and Henry, who ranged in age from 18 to 23. Zimmerman was married but her husband was not living at the Somerset Hotel. Besides Zimmerman there were only fifteen residents who were married, including three married couples, each married for only one year, and there were three widows or widowers; all the rest of the residents were single. Besides Zimmerman's three Illinois-born sons, there were only eight other natives of Illinois. There were 15 immigrants living at the hotel, from Ireland, England, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, and Germany. Americans living in the hotel came from many different states including California, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin. Margaret Westondorft, the 79 year-old Virginia-born widow, mother of ten children, five of whom had pre-deceased her, lived in the Somerset Hotel. She was atypical in that she was one of only 12 women living in the hotel; but, more unusually, she was quite old in a building where the overwhelming majority of residents were between 20 and 40 years old. The resident hotel staff included William Rochelle, a twenty-two years old Texas-born porter; James Pirrer, a twenty-six-year-old Texas-born bell boy and William Robinson, a thirty-year-old North Carolina-born porter. These three staff members were African American all other residents were white.

In comparison with the wealthy industrialists and business people living at the Virginia Hotel, the residents of the Somerset Hotel were middle and lower-middle class workers. Many were undoubtedly just getting established in the city. They were living independently in an extremely cosmopolitan hotel environment, they were unburdened by any great accumulation of possessions. Unlike residents in some of the larger "family" hotels, who lived in the context of a structured family life, the census enumerator did not list the residents as heads of their own households; he simply identified them as "lodgers." They worked in a broad range of occupations. Clerk in Chicago's burgeoning retail and wholesale stores and in business offices was the most common occupation for Somerset Hotel residents. Other residents worked as salesmen, lawyers, cashiers, printers, machinists, singers, bartenders, merchant, steward, physician, veterinary surgeon, saloon keeper, promoter, broker, editor, box maker, nurse, barber, plumber, electrician, cutter, foreman, playwright, scenery artist, laborer, chef, cook, and horse dealer. When census enumerators returned to the hotel in 1910 they found 108 people living there. Again young, single, white men predominated in the hotel. In terms of resident occupations not much had changed, although there were many more residents who worked in various capacities for the railroad. There were also more theater musicians than earlier, and two managers in an automobile factory.

In 1910 the Louis, Oscar, and Alex Mayer took over the proprietorship of the Somerset Hotel and renamed it Hotel Mayer. Initially planned to be called the Stringfield Apartments, though there is no evidence that name was ever used, the Somerset Hotel name had persisted from at least 1897 to 1910. The Mayer Hotel name continued until the early 1920s when the name changed again to the Roosevelt Hotel, a name which has persisted into the 1990s. In 1910 the Mayers also ran Chicago's Revere House hotel. In 1920 Oscar, aged forty-eight, lived in the hotel with his brother Louis, his wife Hattie and his infant son and daughter. The Mayers were the Illinois-born children of German parents. In the 1920s, the same basic mixture of residents that had existed for decades still prevailed. Among the 102 residents were some new occupations not previously encountered by the enumerators, including vaudeville and theatrical actors and actresses, civil engineer, goods inspector, sailor, wire worker, telegraph operator, druggist, real estate dealer, stenographer, pianist, tool maker and automobile salesmen, who undoubtedly worked nearby on the burgeoning Michigan Avenue automobile row.

Architectural historian Paul Groth's 1994 book Living Downtown. The History of Residential Hotels in the United States provides an excellent context and account of the history and operation of hotels like the Somerset Hotel. These buildings, though generally overlooked in accounts of urban housing and American architecture, provided indispensable residences of thousands and thousands of Chicago residents. They were a vital part of the broader residential landscape of the city even though they tended to cut against the grain of single-family domestic ideology and tended to challenge, according to Groth, "the dominant cultural values of how homes should shape American culture." Groth's study also documents the way in which mid-and late-twentieth-century city planners and officials led programs of urban renewal that have systematically demolished the stock of residential hotels. There are very few of these nineteenth-century buildings still standing in Chicago. Of the numerous residential hotels opened in the blocks around the Illinois Central's main terminal only the Somerset Hotel and the eight-story Bordeaux Hotel, designed in 1891 by Baumann & Cady at 1140 S. Michigan Avenue still stand. Constructed of brick, stone, and terra cotta the Bordeaux has a single oriel bay in its front facade. Unlike the Somerset Hotel, with its corner site and its two street facades, the Bordeaux is a mid-block building with only one embellished facade. The corner site afforded De Horvath a greater opportunity than Baumann & Cady enjoyed to work with the prevailing architectural massing and elements characteristic of the larger and more luxurious late-nineteenth Chicago hotels. In 1916 architects Tallmadge & Watson designed the somewhat discordant eighth story added to the original Bordeaux Hotel.

There are a few other Chicago nineteenth-century residential buildings that, along with the Somerset Hotel, share stylistic affinities with the group of high-rise hotels and apartments outlined above. Most notably, the seven-story Yale (1892-1893), designed by John T. Long at 6565 South Yale Avenue; the eight-story Belmonte Flats (1893), designed by Patton & Fisher at 4257-4259 South King Boulevard; and the eight-story Brewster Apartments (1892-1897), designed by Enoch Hill Turnock at the northwest corner of Diversey Boulevard and Pine Grove Avenue. Despite some formal architectural similarities, these buildings are profoundly different from the Somerset Hotel. Most importantly, they are all apartment buildings with kitchens and separate bedrooms, living rooms and dining rooms. The Belmonte Flats had seven-room apartments that rented for four and five times the monthly rates at the Somerset Hotel. In 1900 households in the Belmonte Flats were often made up of married couples, children, some boarders, and domestic servants. Though the boarders shared the marital status, age, and occupational categories of the residents of the Somerset Hotel, they lived architecturally and socially in a very different world.

In the 1910s and 1920s kitchenette apartment hotels tended to eclipse the construction of single-room residential hotels. Buildings like the Somerset Hotel continued to have residents but new buildings provided different space with higher levels of domestic technology and comfort. In designing their buildings Chicago's apartment hotel architects built upon the architectural precedents, the technological and human services, and the social favor captured earlier by high-rise apartment buildings and hotels. They also made important modifications. The compression of floor plans and living spaces proved central to the apartment hotel architects' appropriation and transformation of earlier, more luxurious, high-rise buildings. The architects of kitchenette apartment hotels inverted the logic of the spatial specialization found in luxury apartments and drove the plans toward the end of the housing spectrum previously served by the buildings like the Somerset Hotel. Apartment hotels, more generally, had many different plans, some with suites of rooms, including dining and living rooms and separate bedrooms. Designs for kitchenette apartment hotels are architecturally most directly related to the modest accommodations provided at the Somerset Hotel. They emphasized the efficiency of getting multiple uses out of the same interior spaces. The dining room became an alcove connected to a "kitchenette", a compact and efficient deployment of modern cooking fixtures built into a living room or an adjacent alcove. The dining alcove itself when supplied with a folding wall table was used as a "multi-purpose room," which when not used for dining could accommodate a children's playroom, a den "for the retreat of the man of the house after dinner," or even an extra sleeping space.

In 1914, one observer commented that architects and builders had just about "exhausted their ingenuity" in arriving at economical plans providing living units with complete mechanical services in the smallest possible space. However, architects had begun to rethink "the greatest obstacle in the way of economical utilization of space", the bedroom. Occupying up to one-half of apartment space but used only one-third of the day, the bedroom received close attention. Drawing upon the products of the burgeoning "in-the-door bed" industry, architects and builders in the 1910s began eliminating the bedroom from many middle-class domestic interiors. With beds folding out of dressing closets into living rooms the space, housework, and the expenditure for furnishings required to set up a household, was reduced considerably. The compression of apartment floors plans permitted the developers of kitchenette apartment hotels to appeal to the same sort of people who had previously provided the patronage for furnished rooms in residential hotels like the Somerset Hotel. Increasingly the mixed-use streets around transit lines in outlying residential sections were lined with kitchenette and door-bed apartments; they proliferated in the 1910s and 1920s and to a large extent took the place of buildings like the Somerset Hotel.

Jules De Horvath's Somerset Hotel design explored the possibilities of increasing, residential density at the city's center. It relied on emerging technologies like elevators, electricity, and steam heating that had supported the high-rise development of Chicago's downtown in the 1870s and 1880s. At the same time, De Horvath was designing numerous institutional and residential buildings on the city's expanding suburban edge. He lived in Auburn Park in an 1889 house of his own design; located at 7614 South Union Avenue, and now demolished, the building was notable for its picturesque gables, and towers, and hovering roofs. In 1889 he also designed other parts of Auburn Park's suburban landscape, including two school houses and the Norris, Ingram, Linder, Wilkins, and Winter residences. De Horvath maintained an office in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood before moving into a downtown office on Dearborn Street.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Chicago's residential developers also commissioned De Horvath to design numerous apartment buildings on the South and West sides, some were low-rise buildings with stores others were high-rise buildings with elevators. Most of the apartments employed the same materials as used in the Somerset Hotel, stone ground stories and pressed brick upper walls. In more suburban neighborhoods De Horvath worked in more picturesque building styles and forms. The six-story apartment building he designed in 1892 for B. and D. Wolf at Lake Avenue and Fortieth Street had a Bedford stone base and pressed brick upper walls; the facade was executed in the Venetian style and topped with a red tile roof. As in the Somerset Hotel, the building had projecting segmental bays; unlike the Somerset Hotel the bays opened into the front rooms of eight and nine-room apartments. De Horvath also designed a similar twelve-flat on Grand Boulevard near Thirty-Ninth Street. In 1892 De Horvath designed his most monumental Chicago residential building, the eight-story Potomac Apartments, located on the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue and 30^th Street. The Flemish Renaissance style building incorporated a heavily rusticated stone first floor and brick, terra cotta upper stories, projecting oriel bays surmounted by lavishly embellished gabled parapet walls. The building's two sections, with their seven and eight-room apartments, were entered through two grand two-story gabled entries, located at the base of the building's light courts, a plan similar to the Somerset Hotel's. The Potomac apartments rented for six and seven times as much as a furnished room at the Somerset Hotel. The picturesque elements and massing of the building energetically explored the contemporary idiom of South Side single-family architecture and rendered it on a massive scale. Standing directly across Michigan Avenue from the eleven-story Lakota family hotel, designed in 1891 by the architectural firm of Beers, Clay & Dutton, with its cylindrical corner turret, and its projecting oriel and segmental bays, the Potomac formed part of a monumental entryway to the fashionable South Side residence district.

In 1892 De Horvath planned his largest apartment building for a South Side site near the Lake Shore between 45^th and 47^th streets. The design showed De Horvath's innovative approach to high-density residences. The massive eight-story 175-unit building would cover a plot 150 feet by 265 feet and was designed to include "a central court about 40 feet wide covered with a glass roof, where flowers will be cultivated and to which occupants of the building will have access at all times." The design would have extended the architectural incorporation of design and landscape elements central to the suburban residence districts into the changing form of high-density residential buildings. The glassed court, perhaps patterned on the glass atria of Edbrooke & Burnham's Mecca Flat Apartments, would undoubtedly have provided an extraordinary elaboration of contemporary apartment design. Unfortunately, the building was never constructed and in 1935 the Potomac was demolished. In fact, with the exception of the Somerset Hotel, all of De Horvath's major Chicago residential apartment and hotel designs have been demolished.

The national economic depression of the 1890s sharply curtailed Chicago building, and with it Jules De Horvath's architectural practice. In 1896 he was commissioned to design an eight-story hotel building with retail shops for a prominent site on San Antonio, Texas's main plaza. He also prepared plans for a bank and office building in San Antonio. In the late 1890s De Horvath sold his Auburn Park home and left Chicago. In 1941, in a review of De Horvath's own home, John Drury wrote in Old Chicago Houses that after De Horvath left Chicago there was "no record" of his subsequent career; he concluded, the "story has persisted down to this day that he had claimed kinship to a noble Austrian or Hungarian family." There is in fact no evidence of where De Horvath was born or raised. There is some credible evidence for De Horvath's connection to Hungary, if not to the country's nobility. In 1894, De Horvath designed a synagogue for the First Hungarian congregation on Maxwell Street, near Halsted. Then in 1901, the "News and Note" section of the Construction News reported that "Jul de Horvath, who was a few years ago well known as an architect in Chicago and who designed many structures for speculative builders, is now president of a house-raising company in Budapest."

The Somerset Hotel and many related residential buildings constructed during the early 1890s owed their construction to the building boom provoked by plans for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Ironically, the Fair laid part of the groundwork for major changes in the material and stylistic palette of Chicago architecture; it helped prompt the stylistic eclipse of the very private building it had helped establish. After the building lull of the late 1890s Chicago architects and builders increasingly used light terra cotta and light brick and classically inspired Beaux Arts Renaissance motifs for buildings that they would have designed earlier with exteriors of rusticated stone, dark brick, and Romanesque Revival details.

The architectural legacy of the Fair not only spurred the aesthetic eclipse of buildings like the Somerset Hotel it also envisioned the actual replacement of the Somerset Hotel itself with a building of a different form and style. The vision for replacing the Somerset Hotel was developed in the 1909 Commercial Club's Plan of Chicago, developed by Daniel H. Burnham and his colleagues. The plan proposed an entirely different urban pattern for the neighborhood around Wabash and 12^th Street. The 1909 plan and its elaboration by the Chicago Plan Commission called for the replacement of the existing 1893 Illinois Central Station with a classical style terminal fronting upon Grant Park at Twelfth Street, designed so as to "conform architecturally to the adjacent Field Museum." The plan also called for the widening and improvement of Twelfth Street as it headed west from Grant Park and the new terminal. The planners hoped to removed the 1890s railroad station so that it would no longer block roadway connections and sight lines along Twelfth Street to the lakefront. In 1915 Walter D. Moody, a member of the Plan Commission, insisted that the Twelfth Street improvement was "vitally important to the entire plan of Chicago. The basis of the street system in the plan of Chicago is the quadrangle composed of Twelfth Street, Canal, Chicago Avenue and Michigan Avenue."

Widening Twelfth Street from 50 feet to 118 feet during the late 1910s changed rather drastically the pattern and fabric of the neighborhood around the Somerset Hotel. In 1866, when this portion of Chicago's grid was laid out, Wabash Avenue was, at 100 feet wide, the main street; it organized the grain of the adjacent lots and buildings. Narrow, deep lots extended east and west from Wabash Avenue and determined the placement of the main entrances facing Wabash. Twelfth Street, only half as wide as Wabash was a secondary street where it passed the side elevation and side entrance of the Somerset Hotel. The street widening involved the demolition of all the buildings on the south side of Twelfth Street across from the Somerset Hotel. In the 1920s the Chicago Plan Commission laid out plans for the re-development Twelfth Street, renamed Roosevelt Road in honor of the twenty-sixth president of the United States. Commission plans showed a newly developed boulevard lined with 9 and 14 story business buildings, with their entrances on Roosevelt Road. In 1925 dramatizing the anticipated changes the Commission published views of current conditions "before improvement" and architectural renderings showing the same street scene when the improvements were "completed." One "before improvement" view showed the 12^th Street elevated station and the Somerset Hotel; the next view pictured the replacement of the dark stone and brick Somerset Hotel with a gleaming white terra cotta classically detailed building. The contrasts couldn't have been more striking.

Beyond the road widening, improvements in the district around the Somerset Hotel were slow to develop. The Illinois Central kept using its Romanesque Revival building into the 1970s; when Amtrak took over the passenger business the Illinois Central demolished its old station. The Somerset Hotel proprietors, acknowledging the Plan Commission's local improvements, adopted the name Hotel Roosevelt in the early 1920s but no one stepped forward to redevelop the property. The hotel's proprietor during the 1920s, Albert Gordon, didn't reside at the hotel like his predecessors; instead, he lived in the Buena Park neighborhood. With competition from newer kitchenette apartment hotels and other modern accommodations for middle and lower-middle-class residents in the 1910s and 1920s, the Roosevelt Hotel relied on patronage of poorer people. The development of Roosevelt Road as a major traffic artery increased the value of the storefronts in the ground story, which had included a restaurant, a bar, and a liquor store among its tenants. In 1947, white enameled metal panels were used to modernize the retail space. The color palette was similar to the one envisioned by the Plan Commission, but the modernization stopped well short of the architectural plan outlined in the 1920s.

Building Description

The eight-story Somerset Hotel is a Romanesque Revival style building constructed in 1892-1893 of dark red pressed brick and cut stone. The hotel is located at 1152-1154 South Wabash Avenue, on the northwest corner of Wabash and Roosevelt Road, one-half mile south of the Chicago Loop. Designed by Chicago architect Jules De Horvath, the building's distinctive style and brickwork, its swelling bays and round-arched top-story windows, its stone stringcourses and hood molds, its corner location on a primary thoroughfare, and its mid-rise height, amid adjacent low-rise buildings and modern high-rises, give the building's historic character notable local prominence. Built at the edge of its property line, the Somerset Hotel's front facade extends 50 feet along Wabash Avenue; the finished side elevation stretches 95 feet along Roosevelt Road. The ground story includes a modest hotel lobby and three retail shops with entrances from the street.

The early development of monumental roadways around Chicago's downtown, as outlined by Daniel H. Burnham and the Commercial Club of Chicago in 1909, transformed the area around the Somerset Hotel. Adjacent to the hotel, Twelfth Street was widened from 50 feet to 118 feet, and renamed to honor Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States. The road widening required the demolition of all of the buildings across the street from the hotel's south elevation. The Chicago Plan Commission also planned the architectural and urban transformation of both sides of Roosevelt Road. It envisioned the demolition of the Somerset Hotel and its replacement by a light-colored, nine-story, terra cotta and brick, building with classical embellishments. The hotel's demolition never took place, and in 1947 the hotel's owner modernized the building, placing white enameled metal panels over the rusticated stone of the first floor. Remodeled storefronts included larger expanses of glass in the place of the older rusticated stone. At the level of the second floor, metal panels enclosed the brick walls and a grid of metal sash windows, divided horizontally into three sections, replaced the wood-frame double-hung, one-over-one windows, like those that still line the upper floors. At the same time a recessed entrance, made up of enameled metal panels and visually emphasized by a two story rectangular frame, replaced the rusticated stone entrance arch and its short engaged polished granite columns. The changes to the base of the building reflected pressure to modernize after decades of building stagnation during the Depression and World War II. This remodeling preserved the classic distinction of early Chicago high-rise construction and of De Horvath's original design; it continued the distinct aesthetic treatment of the building's base, mid-section, and cornice. Despite the exterior changes in the lower two floors, the eight-story Somerset Hotel's exterior retains much of its original design integrity and its historic feeling and intelligibility. It is unmistakably rooted in a late-nineteenth-century Chicago architectural idiom. The building is currently vacant, except for a single storefront. Historically designed to accommodate people of fairly modest means, the Somerset Hotel does not have grand or embellished interiors spaces. The basic plan, with its ground story lobby and retail spaces and its double-loaded corridor on the upper stories, retains much of its original configuration.

Architecturally, the Somerset Hotel design incorporated key elements that Chicago architects were developing for high-rise hotel and apartment designs in the late 1880s and 1890s. Swelling segmental window bays on both the east and south elevations give the facades their dynamic and distinctive character. The main elevation, 50 feet wide on Wabash Avenue, is composed symmetrically with segmental bays framing the north and south sides of the elevation. Each bay has two rectangular windows on each floor. Moving in toward the facade's centerline, each bay is flanked by a tier of single window openings. The window lintels are constructed of brick, set vertically in the wall. The central portion of the elevation has two brick piers that rise from just above the entrance to just under the cornice. The verticality of the bays, the two single window tiers, and the two projecting brick piers are offset by the horizontal lines of stone stringcourses that cross the facade at the level of the windows sills on each floor. The stringcourses do not visually interrupt the rise of the two central piers and thus do not intrude upon the compositional emphasis given to the hotel's main entrance. The stringcourses at the fourth and seventh floors project more emphatically than the stringcourses on the other floors and are given additional prominence by the diapered pattern of brickwork just below these two stringcourses. Along with the distinction established by the rusticated stone on the first floor, the original facade was divided into four main horizontal units, visually grouping the first floor; the second and third floors; the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors; and the seventh and eighth floors. The fenestration on the top floor is distinct from that of lower floors. All of the top floor windows are round arched. The projecting window bays terminate at the sill course of the eighth story windows; on the eighth story, three arched windows open in the wall above each of the bays. Single arched windows terminate the single window tiers. On the upper floors all of the windows are double hung windows with a one-over-one pane configuration, Arched stone hoodmolds project from the wall above the top floor windows. The cornice and parapet are made up of a handsome pattern of corbelled, denticulated, and diapered brickwork. The top courses of brick have been removed from the parapet wall of the south elevation but remain intact on the front facade. Behind the parapet, the building's roof is flat. An iron fire escape, built in about 1921, rises through the central part of the front facade; landings stretch across the facade between the curved bays. This fire escape replaced an earlier one with simpler single bay landings and a ladder attached to the south elevation.

As outlined in the summary paragraph, the primary change in the exterior elevation came with a 1947 remodeling that enclosed the first and second floors in white enameled metal panels. The cladding and the expansion of windows in the ground floor retail space eliminated sections of rusticated masonry and projecting entry arches from the base of the building. It also introduced a new grid of three part metal sash windows to the second floor front elevation. This remodeling reflected the broader effort to modernize retail storefronts after World War II and to catch the eyes of shoppers, who were moving around the streets of the city in automobiles rather than on foot. Similarly, the two story high metal and neon hotel sign, projecting from the third and fourth floor at the southeast corner, gave a new scale to the advertising of the "Hotel Roosevelt." Jules De Horvath's original design for the building employed contrasting materials and forms that distinguished the building's base from the floors above--rusticated stone and a heavy cornice at the level of the second floor separated the lower section of the building from the brick walls above. The curved window bays sprung from the second floor, not from the base of the building. The large expanses of glass in the ground story, lighting the corner retail shop and the hotel lobby, also contrasted with the more enclosed quality of the brick walls above. The 1947 remodeling used modern materials but continued the historic distinction between the hotel's base and its upper floors. The remodeling thus reflects the formal pattern of the original design.

The Somerset Hotel's south elevation is 95 feet long and is very much patterned after general forms and brickwork of the front elevation, though it lacks the front elevation's symmetrical disposition. The side elevation reflects the internal division of the hotel into front and back sections with an intervening stair, elevator, and service core. The elevation is composed with a 55 foot wide front block, a 30 foot wide rear block, separated by a 10 foot wide light court that is open toward the south. The light court opens toward Roosevelt Road and was primarily used to illuminate the main stair and elevator core. In the original design, the light court started at the second floor above the side entrance, which projected slightly forward from the wall plane of the ground story. The 1947 exterior cladding closed both the light court and the second story windows along the side elevation. It also introduced a recessed entrance in the place of the projecting side entrance. The fenestration of the front block is asymmetrical. Moving from the east to west, there is a wide uninterrupted brick wall plane at the corner, broken only by the stringcourses at each floor. Then there is a segmental bay with two windows. Then there are three tiers of single windows. Then there is the recessed light court. The rear block is composed symmetrically. A single tier of windows flank both the east and west sides of a central segmental bay with two rectangular windows. As in the front elevation, all of the eighth floor windows are round arched with projecting hoodmolds above. The detailed brickwork of the front cornice and parapet is continued along the side elevation. On both the front and the side elevations a modern ornamental strip of lights projects above the parapet wall.

The rear elevation, on the west, and the side elevation, on the north, have simple common brick in place of the pressed brick of the main street elevations. The west and north elevations lack the decorative treatment of the other elevations. On the rear elevation there are four tiers of single windows. Windows on the first and second floor have been bricked in. The rear elevation is asymmetrical with a wide uninterrupted wall plane at the south corner, a single tier of windows toward the center line of the elevation, with three tiers of single windows grouped together on the north half of the elevation. A fire escape and an exterior ventilation shaft run down the rear elevation. The Somerset Hotel is a free-standing building built out to its lot line. It does not have a party wall with the adjacent building, though there is very little clearance between the two buildings. When the Somerset Hotel was built, it stood adjacent to row houses; these buildings were replaced, before 1906 with a two story retail building. To protect the light and air of the Somerset Hotel's north-facing rooms in the event of higher construction on the adjacent lot, De Horvath placed all the windows in the north in three exterior light wells recessed a few feet from the buildings northern line. The north elevation is asymmetrical with a wide uninterrupted wall plane at the east corner. The front and rear exterior light wells have identical trapezoidal plans, with the broader base defined by the open space at the building line. The canted walls each have a single tier of windows. The flat wall section has a shorter and narrower window opening into a bathroom. The central exterior light well is rectangular in plan with the base defined by the open space at the building line. The short sides of the central well have single tiers of very narrow double hung windows. There are then four tiers of single windows. The two eastern tiers are regular windows the two western tiers are made up of shorter and narrower windows like those in the adjacent wells. All of the windows on the west and north elevation are double hung windows with one-over-one pane configurations. They all have stone sills and slight segmentally arched lintels.

The Somerset Hotel has modest, unembellished interiors, and finishes. The disposition of the interior spaces remain the same as in the original design. The hotel lobby occupies the space on the north half of the ground story, in the front section of the building. It is connected to the front entrance by a hallway flanked by the lobby wall on the north and the back wall of the commercial space on the south. This plan left the south half of the ground story available for retail commercial space. The lobby has simple black and white ceramic tile floors, not original, and marble wainscot. An acoustic tile ceiling covers the original plaster ceiling. The lobby is lighted with windows opening onto Wabash Avenue in the front elevation. The primary circulation core is located west of the lobby between the front and back sections of the hotel. The elevator is a twentieth-century replacement; the light court windows that illuminated the original elevator shaft have been closed with brick. The original white marble treads, pressed tin wainscoting, metal risers with star pattern cut-outs, and sinuous ornamental wrought iron of the balustrade is still in place. The primary stair is made up of a short run of steps to a landing followed a long run of steps to the next floor. A second stair, located on the north side of the front section, with turned wooden balusters and wooden treads rises from the second to the eight floor. This stair is illuminated by a rooftop skylight. Access to the hotel rooms is gained along a T-shaped double-loaded corridor in the front section, with two short corridors branching off from the vertical line of the T. The north branch gives access to the second stair, a bathroom and a single room. The south branch gives access to the room that stands in front of the room oriented toward the building's south-facing light court. In the rear section of the building an L-shaped double-loaded corridor provides access to the rooms. Heavy metal fire doors, added in the twentieth century, separate the central circulation core on each floor, with its corridor, stair landing, and elevator, from the hallways into the front and rear sections of the building. The interiors are extremely simple in their finishes. The floors are wood. The wood doors have simple wood trims; their original transoms have been closed with plywood panels. The typical floor has 18 single rooms. There are no suites. Some rooms do have private bathrooms; other rooms share the bathrooms in the hall. Nearly all of the rooms have exterior windows, the exception being two rooms on each floor in the rear section of the building that open onto an interior light shaft. When the lower portion of the building was remodeled after World War II, it appears that hotel rooms on the second floor were altered into office and storage space. Partitions were removed to create a larger space. A simple stair with a metal banister and simple metal balusters was added between the lobby and the spaces at the front of the building.