Why you should experience Palmer House a Hilton Hotel in Chicago, Illinois.
Palmer House a Hilton Hotel is a storied hotel where the Chicago Loop's post-Fire reinvention, Potter Palmer's commercial ambition, Bertha Palmer's cultural influence and generations of American hospitality converge beneath one of the city's most elaborate painted ceilings.
Set along East Monroe Street near South State Street and just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago, the hotel descends from the Palmer House that businessman Potter Palmer presented to Bertha Honoré Palmer as a wedding gift in 1871, only for the Great Chicago Fire to destroy the property 13 days after its opening. Palmer secured a $1.7 million loan and commissioned architect John M. Van Osdel to build a second hotel, completed in 1873 with fire-resistant construction, elevators, electric bells and unusually ambitious guest facilities as Chicago rebuilt around it. Growing demand eventually prompted the Palmer estate to replace that structure with the present hotel, designed by Holabird & Roche and constructed in phases from 1923 to 1925 as a 25-story complex whose scale reflected the transformation of State Street into the commercial heart of the modern Loop. The result is a hotel where the Palmers, Van Osdel and Holabird & Roche connect the catastrophe of 1871 with more than 150 years of Chicago reinvention at essentially the same downtown address.
What you should know about Palmer House a Hilton Hotel.
Palmer House a Hilton Hotel is best known for a cultural history shaped as much by Bertha Palmer and the artists surrounding the property as by its longevity, beginning with Palmer's role as president of the Board of Lady Managers for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and her patronage of Impressionist art during preparations for the fair. French muralist Louis Pierre Rigal later transformed the present hotel's Grand Lobby ceiling with 21 painted panels derived from Greek mythology, creating an immense visual program above a space illuminated by chandeliers and organized around the ceremonial staircase. Hotel chef Joseph Sehl developed the brownie at Bertha Palmer's request for the Columbian Exposition, creating a portable chocolate confection for women attending the fair; the Palmer House recipe survives through chocolate, butter, sugar, flour, eggs, walnuts and an apricot glaze more than a century after its creation. Conrad Hilton purchased the property in 1945 for $20 million, making Palmer House the first hotel acquired by Hilton outside Texas and connecting one of Chicago's oldest hotel traditions with the national expansion of the company that would carry it into the twenty-first century.
The present building became a performance address as well as a lodging house through the Empire Room, where supper-club culture brought an extraordinary succession of entertainers into the hotel across the twentieth century. Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Liberace and Phyllis Diller were among the performers associated with the room, while Carol Channing developed a particularly enduring relationship with Palmer House during a career that made her inseparable from Hello, Dolly! on Broadway. A $170 million renovation completed in 2008 restored Rigal's lobby paintings, renovated the guestrooms and returned architectural emphasis to public spaces whose decorative program had evolved across generations of ownership and use. The Palmer House entered Historic Hotels of America in 2007 and received National Trust for Historic Preservation recognition through that affiliation, extending a chronology shaped by Potter and Bertha Palmer, Rigal, Sehl, Conrad Hilton and generations of performers whose work made the property an unusually dense repository of Chicago hotel culture.
How to fold Palmer House a Hilton Hotel into your trip.
Palmer House a Hilton Hotel works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing the architects, artists and civic institutions that rebuilt the Chicago Loop into an international center of architecture and culture after 1871.
Begin at Art Institute of Chicago, founded from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1879 and installed in its present Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge building for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where the museum eventually assembled works including Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte-1884, Grant Wood's American Gothic and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks within a collection profoundly enriched by Chicago patrons. Continue to Marquette Building, where Holabird & Roche completed the 17-story office building in 1895 for the Brooks brothers, combining an early steel skeleton with projecting Chicago windows while Tiffany mosaics, bronze reliefs and sculptural programs narrate the seventeenth-century travels of Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet through the region. Conclude at Auditorium Theatre, where Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan completed their immense theater, hotel and office complex in 1889, with Sullivan's ornament, Charles Holloway's murals and Adler's acoustical engineering framing a 4,200-seat auditorium that opened with President Benjamin Harrison in attendance and helped establish Chicago's cultural ambitions before the Columbian Exposition. The progression moves from the fair-era institution shaped by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge through Holabird & Roche's experiments with the commercial skyscraper into Adler and Sullivan's fusion of architecture, engineering and performance, placing Palmer House within the creative generation that remade the Chicago Loop.
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