This once grand Hotel in Baltimore is now abandoned

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The Hotel Kernan, constructed in 1903 for theater impresario James Lawrence "Addie" Kernan (1838-1912), is an example of lavish hotels of the period. Designed by Philadelphia architect John Allen, the hotel was constructed as part of Kernan's Million Dollar Triple Enterprise, which also included the Maryland Theater (now gone) and the Auditorium Theater now Mayfair Theater). Kernan, a noted Baltimore philanthropist who founded the J.L. Kernan Hospital and Industrial School at Radnor Park, lived at the hotel until his death in 1912. The Kernan interests sold the hotel in the 1920s. The establishment, which was renamed the Congress Hotel in 1932, was owned and operated by the Firey family from 1938 to 1977. By the 1970s, Kernan's deluxe establishment had declined into a single-room occupancy hotel. The hotel has been vacant since 1986.

The Hotel Kernan, which features one of the most lavishly decorated exterior bases of any Baltimore hotel, is one of a handful of buildings that survive to represent this distinctive property type, for which Baltimore was particularly noted. Baltimore proved a fertile setting for hotel development. As a trade and transportation entrepot, the city required transient housing for the hundreds of travelers and businessmen passing through the city. In addition to lodging, hotel rooms offered temporary office space for traveling salesmen to display their samples. Moreover, until well into the 20^th century, Baltimore hotels provided permanent as well as transient housing, since the city came late to apartment living.

Baltimore enjoyed a distinguished tradition of fine hotels, boasting one of the three most important American hotels of the early 19^th century. David Barnum's six-story, 200-room City Hotel (built 1825, demolished 1889), designed by William Small, was among the world's grandest hotels, setting a standard for the type. Frances Trollope called Barnum's "the most splendid in the Union" and Charles Dickens praised it as "one of the most comfortable of all the hotels in the United States." Barnum's set the standard for public hospitality that Baltimore's other renowned antebellum hotels, all now gone, adopted. Early hotels included the Fountain Inn, the Eutaw House (constructed 1835, demolished 1916), and the Gilmor House/St. Clair Hotel (constructed ca. 1840, demolished 1897).

In contrast to the inn from which it ultimately evolved, the American hotel developed as a large, multi-room facility that offered a variety of public spaces like lobbies, ballrooms, dining rooms, specialized restaurants, smoking rooms, and bars. Many hotels featured large suites for residential, rather than transient, living. During the 19^th and early 20^th century, hotel residents could enjoy elegant meals and comfortable, stylish quarters without the expense of servants or furniture. As American hotel design progressed and became more specialized toward the end of the 19^th century, technological innovation became essential to the evolution of larger and larger hotels. Steel-frame construction and equipment like elevators, bathrooms, lavatories, and heating systems became increasingly important.' Baltimore's later grand hotels, which exemplified this type, included the St. James Hotel (built 1874, demolished early 1960s), the Rennert Hotel (built 1885, enlarged 1893, demolished 1941), the Altamont Hotel (built 1886, demolished 1965), and the Emerson (built 1911, demolished 1971). Of the dozens of grand hotels in Baltimore, only two turn-of-the-century grand hotels now remain; the Hotel Kernan and the Belvedere (built 1903).

The Hotel Kernan provides a splendid example of how hotels served as settings for ostentatious display. With his theatrical background, James Lawrence "Addie" Kernan possessed the showmanship required to build and operate an establishment that functioned as a social stage. The son of a feed store owner, Kernan was educated at Loyola College and Mount St. Mary's. As a young man working in the transportation department of the B&O Railroad, Kernan lived in the Fountain Hotel, one of Baltimore's grand antebellum hostelries. A rabid partisan during the Civil War, Kernan enlisted in the Confederate Army, was captured, and spent nearly two years as a prisoner of war at Point Lookout.

Despite his conventional job at the B&O, Kernan was drawn to the theatrical world. John Wilkes Booth was a childhood friend and his older brother, Eugene Kernan, invested in theatrical ventures. When Eugene Kernan's lessor defaulted on a loan in 1866, Eugene appointed Addie Kernan receiver of the burlesque house near Baltimore Street and Jones Falls. Addie Kernan helped pioneer burlesque entertainment in Baltimore. After his first theater burned in 1873, he reopened his Fallsway operation as the Central Theater, later rechristening the house as the Monumental Theater and Bridge Theater. He booked a variety of well-known acts, including the exotic dancer Little Egypt, whose gyrations caused Baltimore's police to shut down the theater.

Kernan relished offering popular, mass entertainment. He operated a Summer Garden featuring bands and nightly concerts in an annex across Jones Falls from the Monumental. The Summer Garden boasted pool tables, bowling alleys, a shooting gallery, a woman diver, a boxing ring, and a gas-lit bicycle track for bicycle races. When he took over the historic Holliday Street Theater in 1890, he transformed it from an expensive, elite theatrical establishment to a low-priced venue for melodramas and other populist entertainment. He expanded his empire to include three theaters in Washington; the Grand Opera House, the Lafayette, and the Empire, as well as four theaters in Buffalo.

In 1890 Kernan also bought the Howard Auditorium (later reworked as the structure within the Mayfair Theater) on Howard Street between Franklin and Center. Located in an area dominated by warehouses and granaries (Kernan's father's operation had been in the same block), the Howard's primary audience was students. Kernan quickly instituted the successful practices that marked his other operations. He introduced vaudeville double bills and made the lobby itself an attraction. He transformed the lobby into the Eden Musee, a wax museum featuring tableaux with automatons.

In the 1890s, as Addie Kernan's entertainment ventures reached their peak, he concocted plans for his "Million Dollar Triple Enterprise" that would consist of two theaters and a hotel. The Auditorium Theater (now the Mayfair) would rise on the site of the Howard Auditorium. The Maryland Theater would be constructed on Franklin Street, and the Hotel Kernan would rise on Franklin Street adjacent to the Maryland Theater and backing into the Auditorium. These establishments would upgrade the type of entertainment Kernan presented.

Kernan's vision for the Million Dollar Triple Enterprise shifted several times over the ten years it took to complete it. The scheme originally contemplated two new theaters and a ten-story hotel. Later plans depict a one-story casino instead of the hotel. The Maryland Theater and Hotel Kernan would be constructed on the site of small, 19th-century commercial buildings facing Franklin Street. The Auditorium Theater would rise on the site of the Howard Auditorium. Kernan's architect was John D. Allen, a Philadelphia architect and engineer with wide-ranging experience designing theaters. Little is known about Allen, who first appears in Philadelphia city directories as an architect in 1890. Business directories tout interior art decoration and theater work as his specialties. By 1918 Allen is listed as president of the A. C. Axle Manufacturing Company; he is last listed in 1923. Allen's architectural projects included designs for new construction and alterations of theaters, auditoriums, and amusement parks in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, New York, and Atlantic City. In his design for Kernan's Million Dollar Triple Enterprise, Allen shows a sure hand with the popular architectural vocabulary for hotels and theaters. The contractor was D.W. and G.H. Thomas. Frank Sims of Philadelphia designed the hotel decorations, which were executed by Henry Arens. Minch & Eisenbrey provided furniture and carpets and Thomas Boland was the plumbing contractor. Newspaper articles noted that "the work of construction has been as far as possible by Baltimore labor and with Baltimore material."

By the end of 1902, as construction began, the Million Dollar Triple Enterprise consisted of the two theaters linked by a casino, which replaced the hotel. Rather than demolishing the Howard Auditorium, the Auditorium Theater appears to have been constructed around the existing structure.

In July 1903 a fire within the casino, then under construction, virtually destroyed its interior and seriously damaged its exterior terra cotta. Kernan then returned to his original scheme of a hotel and two theaters, incorporating the surviving street facade of the casino into his hotel.

In architectural style, the Hotel Kernan adopted a loose version of the French Renaissance revival style popularized by the premier hotel architect of the day, Henry J. Hardenbergh of New York. Its lively facade held its own with the festive Maryland Theater next door, consistent with the popular idiom of hotel design in Baltimore. Late 19th-century hotels like the St. James, Rennert, and Altamont featured picturesque rooflines with mansard roofs punctuated by towers and dormers; load-bearing masonry facades enlivened with projecting bays; and prominent entry features. The Hotel Kernan, like the contemporary Belvedere and the later Emerson, retained the hallmark hotel mansard. However, the Hotel Kernan was transitional in style, adopting the picturesque facade articulation and highly plastic ornament of the earlier hotels. It translated the refined French Renaissance revival vocabulary of the fashionable contemporary hotels into a more theatrical baroque. The base of the building, originally designed as the facade of the free-standing casino, gave the building particular panache.

The Hotel Kernan opened to great fanfare on September 3^rd, 1905, the crowning piece of Kernan's Million Dollar Triple Enterprise. The opening was scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the fall season for the two theaters, which were inaugurated the preceding year. Kernan invited leading lights of Baltimore to the opening, including noted Baltimore architects E. Francis Baldwin and Charles Cassell. An enormous rathskeller, later billed as Baltimore's first nightclub, was housed in the basement. A grand dining room occupied the eastern half of the first floor; the western portion of the first floor served as an art gallery displaying Kernan's personal collection of 19th-century drawings and paintings. Hotel rooms were located on the upper floors.

A newspaper article describing the opening details the twin concerns of technology and luxurious public spaces that characterized American hotel building at the turn of the century:

Advertisements for the Hotel Kernan played up its "plunger elevator system" noted that the facility was "absolutely fireproof" and "perfectly safe." The Hotel Kernan's advertisements also touted its sumptuous amenities like its cuisine, "hygienic barber shop," and "special attention to after-theatre supper parties and private banquets." Leading performers, like Adelina Patti, appearing at Kernan's theaters were featured entertainers in the dining room, rathskeller, and palm garden. Clearly the Hotel Kernan provided an opportunity for guests to enjoy the trappings of a luxurious life only available to the wealthiest private households.

The two theaters comprising the Million Dollar Triple Enterprise exhibited the same exalted taste as the hotel. Addie Kernan exercised stern censorship to guarantee that the upgraded vaudeville fare was suitable for family audiences. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin both played in vaudeville acts at the Maryland Theater. Later performers included Will Rogers, Weber & Fields, Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. The Auditorium, leased to the Schubert organization, featured legitimate theater. With the decline of vaudeville, the Maryland Theater was converted to a legitimate stage in 1927. Nestled between Kernan's two theaters and on the same block with the Academy of Music, the Hotel Kernan became the favorite of theatrical people and road show personnel. Described as "the hub of theatrical life and the headquarters of sportsmen," it hosted Henry Fonda's wedding to Margaret Sullivan.

Kernan was a self-made man who never forgot his humble roots. He was an active Democrat, serving as both a Park Commissioner and Jail Commissioner. A generous soul, he assisted Confederate veterans and Catholic charities. His obituary noted that he typically wrote out checks to various organizations serving the needy three times a week. He is best remembered, however, for his work establishing the James Lawrence Kernan Hospital and Industrial School for Crippled Children. In a state reluctant to provide public hospitals or facilities for children with special needs, Kernan's generosity was immensely important. Kernan became involved with the hospital in 1909 when Ada Mosby wrote to him requesting the loan of a piano to the Hospital for Crippled and Deformed Children, an institution housed in small buildings in the 2000 block of North Charles Street. When Kernan visited the makeshift facility and learned that Ada Mosby was the daughter of John Mosby, one of the heroes of the Confederacy, he gave the hospital a piano and became increasingly involved with its patients. In 1910 Kernan purchased the Radnor Park estate of William H. Ferguson for the hospital and gave the hospital $10,000 to adapt it for their use. The following year the hospital voted to change its name to honor Kernan, who visited the hospital every Sunday. Kernan then incorporated his hotel and entertainment enterprises, retaining a life interest in $340,000 worth of stock which was to be transferred to the hospital upon his death.

Kernan remained actively involved with both the hospital and the hotel. In December 1912 Kernan died in his rooms at the hotel after a brief bout of pneumonia. Active until the end, he had taken dessert in the hotel dining room and watched games of pool in the billiard room on the night he took ill. At his death, he was eulogized by Cardinal Gibbons and memorialized for his "unfailing faith in Baltimore" on the editorial page of the Baltimore Sun. Kernan's provision for the hospital in his will was so generous that in 1916 his son unsuccessfully contested both the will and the earlier incorporation of his father's hotel and entertainment interests.

After Kernan's death, the decline of vaudeville and changing tastes in entertainment ultimately led to the dismantlement of his empire. Kernan's successor operation sold the Hotel Kernan to a Michigan company. In 1932 the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company of Philadelphia, the mortgage holder, bought Kernan's "Million Dollar Triple Enterprise" at a bankruptcy auction for $225,000. The Philadelphia insurance company immediately made "extensive renovations" and changed the hotel's name to the Congress Hotel.

They operated the Congress Hotel through 1938, when Penn Mutual sold the hotel to M.J. Firey, a third-generation hotel operator from Kingston, North Carolina, for $150,000. The Firey family would continue to own and operate the hotel for nearly 40 years. The theaters remained on the market. In 1942 motion picture operator C. W. Hicks bought the Maryland Theater and adapted it for motion pictures. It was demolished for a parking lot in 1951.

M.J. Firey's son, Milton, a Cornell Hotel School graduate, made extensive changes to the hotel. Like Baltimore's other hotels, the Congress suffered hard use during World War II. When Milton Firey inherited his father's hotel in 1945, he immediately began major alterations using the Southern Hotel Journal's study of modernization, "The 100-Room Hotel Study," as his guide. Firey made several exterior changes to attract automobile travelers on Franklin Street, which was also Route 40, a major route west. The present Federal revival frontispiece was installed, masking the original recessed entrance, which was "certainly not an attractive invitation to a passing motorist. A well-lit projecting marquee and new roof-top sign transformed the pedestrian scale of the original building to the automobile. On the interior, Firey reworked the public spaces, particularly on the west side of the building. He partitioned an existing mezzanine into commercial office space and leased the dining room as office space to a bank, a lawyer, and an insurance company, and constructed a mezzanine in the upper portion of the former "Peacock Alley" [probably the original Art Gallery] in the northwest quarter of the building. On the upper floors he installed vinyl wall covering to cover the extensive cracks in the interior walls.

The Business Editor of the Sun noted that "what the Congress is doing is being done by hotels here and across the nation, that is, creating more guest rooms in the same floor area, by eliminating waste space and more efficient layouts."(sic) Firey started another $250,000 five year program of improvements in 1950, followed by an additional series of changes costing $150,000. He installed a new elevator and added 42 new guest rooms and bathrooms in 1955. He also added room air conditioning and installed vinyl wall coverings in all the guest rooms. The innovative manager even returned the hotel to its theatrical roots. He invited the Vagabonds, one of Baltimore's oldest little theater groups, to establish their theater in the basement rathskeller.

However, even Firey's management skill could not overcome forces set in motion by the automobile. Like Baltimore's other downtown hotels, the Congress Hotel's doom was sealed by suburban flight and the decline of the center city. By the 1970s, the once proud Hotel Kernan had become a single room occupancy hotel whose rooms rented for less than $5/day. "The once-posh Congress had declined almost to derelict status. It was by then a great, crumbling hulk of a building, a ceiling-cracked, pipe-clanking, plaster-fallen parody of the palace that once had gleamed so brightly beneath the flood lights."

In 1977 Angelo and Samuel Palumbo purchased the run-down building, which they continued to operate as a single-room-occupancy hotel. A newspaper article from the period noted that "the Congress became shabbier and shabbier, like an old movie star down on his luck." Sam Palumbo, who was an engineering draftsman in the Baltimore city housing department, claimed that he sank $100,000 into the hotel, but in 1979 he was cited for 174 housing code violations, including a lack of smoke detectors. Entertainment venues in the building, however, were code compliant and enjoyed greater success.

The old rathskeller in the basement became the Marble Bar. Roger Anderson and his wife Leslee operated the music club from 1978 to 1995. The Marble Bar was a vital element of Baltimore's music scene, providing a stage for emerging acts too original for other clubs. During its heyday the Marble Bar booked emerging talent like the Psychedelic Furs, REM, X, and Squeeze before they became nationally recognized.

The Hotel Kernan has been vacant since 1986. The building, which is occasionally used for television and film shoots, is in deteriorated condition. Vandals have stripped the decorative metal that once clad the exterior oriels and the hood molds above the dormer windows.

Building Description

The Hotel Kernan, designed in 1903 by Philadelphia architect John Allen for theatrical impresario James Lawrence Kernan, originally comprised one of three elements of Kernan's "Million Dollar Triple Enterprise." The other two components were the Auditorium Theater (now called Mayfair Theater, in severely deteriorated condition) and the Maryland Theater (demolished 1951). The one-story base of a recessed hyphen (now gone) that connected the Hotel Kernan with the Maryland Theater survives as a vestigial entrance, connected to the west end of the primary facade of the hotel. The six-story plus mansard, French renaissance revival style Hotel Kernan is detailed in brick and terra cotta. The hotel, which faces south onto Franklin Street, is of steel and reinforced concrete construction and U-shaped in plan. The principal (south) facade, the only detailed facade, is finished with a stone base, brick walls, and highly ornate terra cotta detailing. The interior plan of the building consists of public rooms to either side of a central entry on the ground floor and basement level, and hotels rooms disposed about a double-loaded U-shaped corridor on the upper floors.

The building was altered in 1932 and again in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when owner Milton Firey undertook an extensive modernization campaign. Although the building, which has been vacant since 1986, has been stripped of all of its decorative metal exterior trim and much of its interior fixtures and furnishings, a considerable amount of the elaborate plaster detailing in the first floor public spaces as well as the renowned marble bar in the basement still remain.

The Hotel Kernan is a six-story plus mansard, brick and terra cotta French renaissance revival style building of steel and reinforced concrete construction. The sculptural, highly plastic character of its primary facade relates more closely to its eclectic 19th-century hotel predecessors than to the more restrained revival styles that characterized Baltimore's later hotels and the contemporary Hotel Belvedere. The mid-block building, which faces south onto Franklin Street, is flanked by a large parking lot (formerly the site of the Maryland Theater) on the west and mid-19^th century low rise structures on the east. Its rear (north) facade abuts the south facade of the Auditorium Theater (Mayfair), the only other remaining element of James L. Kernan's Million Dollar Triple Enterprise; only a small part of the undetailed upper portion of the north facade is visible from the street. The shadow of Kernan's Maryland Theater (demolished in 1951), which was completed before the Hotel Kernan, can be seen on the undetailed brick west facade of the Hotel Kernan. The one-story projecting base of the recessed hyphen that connected the two buildings remains as a vestigial entrance, attached to the southwest corner of the hotel, the cornerstone of the Million Dollar Triple Enterprise, which bears the date "1903," survives next to the west end of the vestigial entrance. The U-shaped plan of the upper floors of the building creates a large light well at the center of the east facade. There are smaller, shallow lightwells notched into the north and west facades as well.

The front (south) facade is the Hotel Kernan's only detailed facade. With the exception of shallow returns at the south end of the west and east facades, the east, west, and north facades are utilitarian in appearance. The south facade is a tripartite composition based on the Beaux Arts convention of base, shaft, and crown. The rusticated stone base of the building, which rests on a granite watertable, was originally designed as a free-standing, 1-1/2 story casino. It features an elaborately decorated central arch that rises above a full entablature marking the top of the base, dramatizing the hotel entrance below. The central arch is delineated by a broken scroll pediment that supports cherubs holding a cartouche. Two circular windows occupy the tympanum of the arch. An arched opening below this central arch originally featured a recessed entrance containing a wide granite stair leading up to the hotel lobby and flanking stairs leading down to a rathskeller and other public facilities in the basement. This entrance echoed the form of the vestigial entrance leading to the hyphen (now gone) that once connected the Hotel Kernan with the Maryland Theater. The original central recessed entry is now hidden from the street by the present ca. 1946 Federal revival frontispiece that houses the double doors providing access to the hotel. Elaborate classical detailing on the base includes fluted pilasters supporting a frieze with rosettes; panels decorated with swags, shields, crotches, and nymphs; and voussoirs with console keystones.

The vestigial entrance, the former one-story recessed entrance to the hyphen that connected the Hotel Kernan to the Maryland Theater (now gone), survives as a shallow element at the west end of the primary (south) facade. (Regulations that went into effect after the Great Fire of 1904 required that steps or stairs be recessed behind the plane of the building.) Rusticated piers resting on a granite watertable frame a massive terra cotta arch embellished with ornamented spandrels, egg-and-dart molding, a paneled soffit, and a console keystone decorated with a swag and ornamental drop pendant. The keystone and consoles support a projecting balcony once topped with terra cotta balusters. Only the metal framework and piers of the balcony now remain. The curved southwest corner of the Hotel Kernan extends down behind the arch. Recessed granite stairs lead up to an entrance at the first floor level and down to an entrance to the basement. Decorative metal bars are placed in front of the blank wall at the top of the stairs.

The variegated material and massing of the shaft of the Hotel Kernan (second - sixth stories) breaks up the bulk of the hotel's street facade and contributes to the hotel's robust; sculptural quality. The shaft is articulated in an a reeded manner that enhances the verticality of this essentially square facade. Piers and arcades that rise the height of the shaft are highlighted by quoins of contrasting color. The rounded return at the western corner of the building echoes the prominent round bay that anchors the southeast corner of the building. Three-story oriels surmounted by balustraded balconies add additional vertical emphasis. Historic photographs indicate the oriels were once clad in what appears to be decorative metal; today their surface is exposed concrete. Additional terra cotta balconies project at the third and fifth story levels to either side of the central element of the building. For the most part, fenestration consists of one-over-one sash, with two-over-two sash in many of the windows within the curved corners. Much of the sash appears broken or damaged.

The tiled mansard roof serves as the crown of the building. The mansard returns around the southern portion of the east facade to the edge of the lightwell. While many of the tiles are missing, the roof retains its original iron cresting. At the southern end of the east elevation, there is a large frame above the roof for a neon sign that reads "Friendship Classic Inn." Hooded window molds, once clad in decorative metal, project from the mansard. Pedimented terra cotta dormers housing paired one-over-one windows interrupt the cornice line.

The east elevation, which faces an alley, is arranged around a central recessed lightwell that begins at the second story. The channeled brick of the first story, which terminates in a corbelled stringcourse, echoes the rustication pattern of the primary facade. The southern block of the U is detailed in buff brick and surmounted by the mansard roof; the remaining portion of the east facade is detailed in common brick and topped by a corbelled cornice. A hexagonal bay of exposed concrete projects east into the center of the light well. Window openings are detailed in a utilitarian manner; smaller window openings at the center of the north and south block of the east facade probably indicate the location of original bathrooms.

The west facade was not designed to be exposed, as it is today. The west wall of the Hotel Kernan originally abutted a hyphen that connected the hotel with the Maryland Theater. When the Maryland Theater was demolished in 1951, it left the Congress Hotel, as it was by then named, a free-standing building. The brick facade of the hotel now bears the scar of the former roof line of the Maryland Theater, which was completed before the Hotel Kernan, and displays several brick-up openings that indicate interconnections between the two buildings. The only decorative features on the west facade are a corbelled cornice and faint lettering of "HOTEL KERNAN" visible at the top of the southern end of the west facade.

The entrance at the center of the Hotel Kernan currently provides the only access to the interior of the building. (The vestigial entrance at the west end of the building, which is now sealed, also provided access to the hotel.) Public spaces are situated in the basement and first floor; upper floors house hotel rooms along a double-loaded, U-shaped corridor. The circulation system of the building originally consisted of an open well stair placed near the center of the base of the U and an elevator in the northeast corner of the building. (An additional stair in the demolished hyphen connecting the Hotel Kernan with the Maryland Theater would have provided secondary egress.) In the mid-20^th century an elevator was placed within the open well of the stair and a fire stair was placed within the elevator shaft in the northeast corner.

The original, elaborate recessed entrance to the building is intact behind the present ca. 1946 frontispiece. A wide granite stair with balusters leads to the first floor; flanking stairs lead down to the basement, which was originally designed as a rathskeller. The open plan basement houses the celebrated marble bar; the back bar has vanished. With the exception of the bar, this space appears to have been stripped of any decorative features. On the first floor, the central entry leads into a late-20^th century registration lobby immediately north of the stair. The dining room, which occupies the eastern half of the floor, appears to be the most intact of the public areas. It retains its full ceiling height and sufficient elaborate cast plaster detail to indicate the original character of the space. Fixtures like doors and hardware have been stripped from the building. The kitchen is located against the north wall of the building at the north end of the dining room. The probable Palm Court at the west side of the front of the lobby is also intact. In 1947, Milton Firey, the owner/manager of the hotel, created an L-shaped mezzanine that wrapped around the northwest corner of the building, behind the stair, dropping the ceiling over the former art gallery and registration desk.

The six upper stories above the mezzanine are identical in plan. Rooms are placed on either side of a central U-shaped corridor that extends around the deep lightwell on the east side of the building. Smaller lightwells placed at the center of the north and west facades, and a lightwell notched into the northwest corner of the building, provide light to rooms that would have faced the Maryland and Auditorium Theaters. While the plan of the corridor on the upper floors appears to be intact, no decorative elements remain. The upper floors originally housed suites as well as single rooms. While some rooms had private baths, each floor probably housed lavatories serving several rooms. The floor plan of the upper floors has been reworked to create additional rooms and additional private baths. The building, which declined into a single-room occupancy hotel before being abandoned in 1986, is in fair to poor condition.

South facade looking northeast (1999)

North and west facades, looking southeast (1999)

East facade, looking west (1999)

Entrance, south facade (1999)

Entrance, south facade (1999)

First floor dining room (1999)

Basement looking northwest, marble bar in center back (1999)

Second floor hall outside elevator (1999)