Why you should experience Bluegreen Vacations Hotel Blake, an Ascend Collection Hotel in Chicago, Illinois.
Bluegreen Vacations Hotel Blake, an Ascend Collection Hotel is a literary-minded heritage hotel where Printer's Row's publishing legacy, early skyscraper experimentation, creative reinvention and enduring attachment to the printed word converge within a nineteenth-century commercial building.
Set along South Dearborn Street near West Congress Parkway and just steps from Harold Washington Library Center, the hotel incorporates the former Morton and Duplicator buildings, part of the dense concentration of printing and publishing structures that developed around Dearborn Street during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 12-story Morton Building originated in 1896 as the Davis Building, designed by Jenney & Mundie for Thomas A. Davis, placing William Le Baron Jenney, widely associated with the emergence of skeletal-frame skyscraper construction in Chicago, within the architectural ancestry of the present hotel. Printer's Row developed around unusually long, narrow blocks whose configuration admitted abundant daylight for engraving and typesetting, while firms clustered near Dearborn Station after its 1885 opening created one of Chicago's defining publishing districts before printing operations began leaving during the 1960s. The result is a hotel where Jenney & Mundie, Thomas A. Davis, nineteenth-century publishing firms and the physical requirements of typesetting connect Printer's Row's industrial past with a building still participating in the neighborhood more than a century later.
What you should know about Bluegreen Vacations Hotel Blake.
Bluegreen Vacations Hotel Blake, an Ascend Collection Hotel is best known for becoming the 100th domestic property in Choice Hotels International's Ascend Hotel Collection in January 2014, a milestone announced during the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles after Bluegreen Vacations and Choice established a strategic marketing alliance in January 2013. Bluegreen President and CEO John M. Maloney Jr. positioned the relationship around connecting Bluegreen owners with Choice's international hotel network, while TravelerPlus participants gained eligibility for Choice Privileges enrollment and Elite Gold status through the partnership. Choice reported more than 121 Ascend properties and 6,300 hotels across its wider system when Hotel Blake joined the arrangement, placing the independently characterized Chicago property inside a rapidly expanding global distribution network. Bluegreen subsequently incorporated Hotel Blake into its vacation ownership portfolio while Choice continues presenting the property under Ascend Collection, creating a dual character linking Bluegreen's club-resort system with Choice's collection of individually branded hotels.
Greek immigrants Nick Karabelas and Yianni Theoharis develop another strand of the property's character through Meli Café, having been friends before opening Nine Muses in Greektown in 1990 and subsequently creating the first Meli in 2006 after seeking a breakfast restaurant built around higher-quality ingredients. Meli, whose name means honey in Greek, developed its culinary style around imported Greek honey, real maple syrup, organic eggs, fresh juices and house-made preparations, while its Hotel Blake location became the largest of the original three Chicago branches and the only one then serving dinner. The current Hotel Blake dining program continues that ingredient-focused lineage through fresh-squeezed juices, high-grade maple syrup, house-made whipped butters, freshly baked challah bread, Eggland's Best organic products and Meli's proprietary coffee blend. Together, Karabelas, Theoharis, Nine Muses and Meli Café connect the property with Chicago's Greek restaurant culture through a business partnership extending from Greektown in 1990 to a Printer's Row dining room operating more than three decades later.
How to fold Bluegreen Vacations Hotel Blake into your trip.
Bluegreen Vacations Hotel Blake, an Ascend Collection Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing railway ambition, structural experimentation and the institutional life of books through Printer's Row and the southern Chicago Loop.
Begin at Dearborn Station, where architect Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz designed the Romanesque Revival terminal opened in 1885 for the Chicago & Western Indiana Railroad, eventually serving carriers including Santa Fe, Erie, Grand Trunk Western and Monon before passenger service ceased in 1971 and a 1976 fire destroyed the train shed and upper portions of the clock tower. Continue to Monadnock Building, where Burnham & Root completed the northern half in 1891 with load-bearing masonry walls reaching six feet thick at the base before Holabird & Roche completed the southern addition in 1893 using a more advanced metal-frame system, compressing a pivotal structural transition in Chicago architecture into one building. Conclude at Harold Washington Library Center, where Hammond, Beeby and Babka won a 1987 design competition for Chicago's new central library and produced the enormous red-brick building opened in October 1991 and named for Harold Washington, the city's first Black mayor, who had died in office in 1987. The progression moves from Eidlitz's railway gateway through Burnham, Root, Holabird and Roche's structural experimentation into Washington's civic legacy and Hammond, Beeby and Babka's grand home for books, revealing the transportation, architecture and literary culture surrounding Hotel Blake.
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