| Hilton Chicago | |
|---|---|
| Hilton Chicago seen from Sears Tower | |
| Location | 720 S. Michigan Avenue Chicago, United States |
| Coordinates | 41.872499, -87.624357 |
| Opening date | 1927 (as the Stevens Hotel) |
| Architect | Holabird & Roche[1] |
| Owner | Hilton Hotels Corporation |
| Rooms | 1,544 |
| Suites | 90 |
| Restaurants | 3 |
| Total floor area | 2,054,590-square-foot (190,878 m2) |
| Floors | 29 |
| Parking | 510-car capacity parking garage |
The Hilton Chicago is a famous luxury hotel in Chicago, United States. The hotel is a Chicago landmark that overlooks Grant Park, Lake Michigan, and the Museum Campus. It is the third-largest hotel in Chicago by number of guest rooms; however, it has the largest total meeting and event space of any Chicago hotel.[2] The hotel has housed every president of the United States since its opening in 1927.[3]
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The hotel, designed in the Beaux-Arts architecture style, originally opened in 1927 as the Stevens Hotel, across Balbo Street from the older Blackstone Hotel. At the time, the Stevens was the largest hotel in the world.[4][5] The hotel was developed by James W. Stevens, his son Ernest, and their family who ran the Illinois Life Insurance Company and owned the Hotel La Salle. The Stevens featured 3,000 guest rooms, cost approximately $30 million to construct (more than ten times the cost of Yankee Stadium only few years earlier), and boasted of a virtual "City Within a City". The Stevens housed its own bowling alley, barber shop, rooftop miniature golf course (the "High-Ho Club"), movie theater, ice cream shop, and drug store.[6] The first registered guest was Vice President Charles G. Dawes.[7]
The Great Depression ruined the Stevens family, and the State of Illinois charged the hotel's owners with financial corruption. As with four out of five American hotels during the Great Depression, the Stevens Hotel went bankrupt.[8] The government took the hotel into receivership, and by the late 1930s, it was valued at only $7 million.[9] The youngest heir of the Stevens family was seven years old when the hotel opened. His legacy as John Paul Stevens would be to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
In 1942 the U.S Army purchased the Stevens Hotel for $6 million for use as barracks and classrooms for the Army Air Force during WWII. The Stevens housed over 10,000 air cadets during this time, who utilized the Grand Ballroom as their mess hall. In January 1944, the War Department closed a deal to sell the property for $4.91 million to a bricklayer turned private businessman named Stephen Healy.[10]
As World War II drew to a close, Conrad Hilton purchased the hotel from Healy in February 1945.[11] The board of directors changed the name of the hotel, branding it after Conrad Hilton himself in November 1951.[12] Conrad continued to use his Hollywood connections to entice film stars, politicians and royalty to the hotel.
Among improvements made to the hotel was the installation of a large ice stage in the Boulevard Room Supper Club which began featuring elaborate ice shows in 1948. The Hilton Center was added to the building in 1962, featuring a three-level structure containing expanded exhibit space, the Continental Ballroom and the International Ballroom.[13]
In April 1951, crowds gathered in the Great Hall to hear a speech by General Douglas MacArthur defending his conduct of the war in Korea, calling for a new American policy toward the conflict to replace the current "political vacuum".[14]
During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the streets outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel were the scene of a battle between Mayor Richard J. Daley's police and antiwar demonstrators. Some protestors flooded into the hotel with tear gas and "stink bombs."
The Conrad Hilton hotel was showing its age, and some were considering its possible demolition by the 1970s. However, in 1984, the hotel closed for what was then the most expensive hotel renovation ever undertaken, at $185 million. The hotel was shut down for over a year as the 3,000 guest rooms were rebuilt into 1,544 larger and more elegant rooms. 600 of the rooms were converted to double sized rooms with two adjoining bathrooms. The reborn hotel glittered and helped to sustain a neighborhood revival period in Chicago's South Loop. The newly renamed Chicago Hilton and Towers was reopened on October 1, 1985.[15]
In 1998, under a new initiative by Hilton Hotels Corporation, the Hilton name would be placed first in branding, and the Chicago Hilton and Towers became simply "Hilton Chicago".[16]
Under general manager John G. Wells, the hotel continues its track record of having hosted every U.S. president since it opened in 1927.[17]
The Hilton Chicago is home to Chicago's largest and most expensive hotel room. The Conrad Hilton suite is a 5,000-square-foot (460 m2) suite that encompasses two floors. The suite costs more than $7,000 per night, which includes 16-foot lakeview windows, 18th-century tapestries, a baby grand piano, a billiard table, three balconies, and a flat-panel television over the Jacuzzi.[18] It had played host to famous guests such as Tony Blair, Ray Charles, Cher, Joe DiMaggio, Alan Greenspan, Bob Hope, James Earl Jones, Luciano Pavarotti, Frank Sinatra, John Travolta and Hu Jintao.[19][20]
The Hilton Chicago has been featured in many prominent movies[21][22] and TV shows including:
The Hilton Chicago is home to the Normandie Lounge, a promenade that was created from panels and furniture from the famed French Line ocean liner, SS Normandie.
In Bernard Malamud's The Natural, Harriet Bird shoots Roy Hobbs in a room at the Stevens Hotel.[24]
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