The Golden Age of Hotels

January 26, 2011

These photographs depict what had been the Townsend Hotel, and what is now the Natrona County Townsend Justice Center. This building depicts an evolution in transportation, and in the downtown landscape of cities, which incidentally has a direct legal connection.

This building was originally built in the 1920s as a nice hotel. It served in that capacity up in to the 1960s. It was well suited to do so, being only two blocks from the train depot. What it lacked, however, was parking.

Starting in the 1960s, after the massive nationwide improvement in highways, and the corresponding decline in rail transportation, this building became a bit of a flop house. It finally closed in the late 1970s, after its restaurant closed down (the restaurant had not declined like the hotel itself).

In the last decade it was rebuilt as a courthouse.

This says a lot about downtowns as they once were, and are today. Built in the golden age of hotels, this hotel was in a neighborhood of similiar hotels, all of which offered lodging and dining. They didn't offer parking. They couldn't survive the motorization of the country. They depended upon rail transportation for their business. They made, however, for a busy downtown.

Postscript

May 29, 2014

I was reminded of  this old post as one of the oldest buildings in Casper is undergoing renovations, and I took a few photographs of it this past week when those renovations revealed   a "ghost sign" that was painted on it when the building was a hotel.  I posted those photos on our Painted Brick's blog.

The former County Annex, being rebuilt as the Hotel Virginia.

The building is sort of returning to its original use as apartments, under one of its apparent former names, the Hotel Virginia. This building is older than the old Townsend Building depicted above in this thread, and its one of the oldest surviving brick buildings in Casper.  

What's interesting about this, other than the age of the building, is that this building is one block over from the Townsend.  And its on the same block as what was the Gladstone (now an office building).  It would have been catercorner from the Henning. So Casper had four brick hotels, three of which were quite substantial, withing a block of each other.

In thinking on it, if a person goes just a couple of blocks out, this trend continues.  The street depicted in this photograph is 1st Street, which was also the east/west highway at that time.  A couple of blocks away were a couple of motels, true Motor Hotels, of early vintage, one of which had a swimming pool.

Today all the major current hotels in Casper are along the interstate highway. Casper has an assortment of modern hotels and business hotels, but what's interesting about that is how the hotels had migrated by the 1960s to the interstate.  The downtown hotels were dying by that time, and by the 1980s none of the original downtown brick hotels that were located in the heart of the downtown era were still hotels. This is, of course, a very typical story, demonstrating the evolution from rail travel, to car travel, to those cars being on a state highway at first, and an interstate highway later.