Hotel Statler (St. Louis, Missouri)

The Renaissance Grand Hotel is a remodelled and expanded hotel located on the Washington Avenue Loft District in Downtown St. Louis, Missouri. It is 256 feet 23 floors tall. It was designed by George C. Post and was built in 1917 as part of the Statler Hotels. It was the first air-conditioned hotel in the United States. The building was renamed the Gateway Hotel in 1966. It closed for a planned renovation in 1987 and never reopened. With the opening of the Cervantes Convention Center right across the street, and developers clambering for more hotel room space, the hotel seemed a blatantly obvious choice for renovation, though it began to si vacant a decade after the completion of the convention center, subject to decay and several fires. Cleanup work began on the hotel in November 1999 at a cost of $5 million. The hotel was then renovated from 2000 to 2002 and an addition, which was to have originally had 38 floors but then reduced to match the height of the existing hotel, was constructed to the east. It was renamed the Renaissance Grand Hotel. It has 875 rooms and 198 suites. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.^[1]

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