Why you should experience The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop in Chicago, Illinois.
The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop is a theatrical Loop hotel where German immigrant entrepreneurship, 1920s entertainment culture and Randolph Street's century of performance history converge within the former Bismarck Hotel.
Set along West Randolph Street near North LaSalle Street and just steps from Cadillac Palace Theatre, the hotel traces its origins to Stuttgart-born brothers Emil and Karl Eitel, who arrived in Chicago during the early 1890s and established the original Bismarck Hotel at 171 West Randolph Street in 1894. The brothers eventually joined Robert, Max and Otto Eitel in developing a hospitality enterprise whose ambitions culminated when the original property was demolished in 1924 and replaced by a substantially larger hotel within the Eitel Block. The rebuilt Bismarck reopened in 1926 alongside the New Palace Theatre, creating an integrated hotel-and-entertainment complex as Randolph Street emerged as one of Chicago's principal theater corridors. The result is a hotel whose Eitel family origins, 1894 beginnings, 1924 demolition and 1926 rebirth connect immigrant enterprise with the emergence of Chicago's Theatre District at its interwar peak.
What you should know about The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop.
The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop is best known for a succession of reinventions that began when the Wirtz family sold the former Eitel Block to PalMet Venture in 1997, bringing Kimpton Hotel Group into a property that would reopen as Hotel Allegro following a $31 million renovation in 1998. The project restored the hotel's grand marble staircase and returned original light fixtures discovered in its basement to service, using surviving components of the Bismarck era to establish the character of the newly named Allegro rather than severing the property from its earlier life. Another two-year, $15 million renovation began in 2014, extending the interwar design style through the guestrooms and public spaces as Kimpton approached two decades of stewardship at the Randolph Street address. Sonesta International Hotel Corporation acquired the property in 2020, beginning the hotel's next operating era and eventually placing its 483 rooms within The Royal Sonesta portfolio while preserving the Allegro name created during the 1998 revival.
The hotel's cultural history is inseparable from the theater constructed beside it, where architects Cornelius W. Rapp and George L. Rapp designed the 1926 New Palace Theatre as the flagship of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit and Roger Wolfe Kahn and His Orchestra headlined its October 4 opening. The auditorium shifted into the RKO Palace Theatre in 1931, became Eitel's Palace Theatre in 1953 and introduced Chicago audiences to the widescreen Cinerama format that July with This Is Cinerama, before another chapter as the Bismarck Theatre began during the 1980s. A $20 million restoration preceded its 1999 reopening as Cadillac Palace Theatre, preserving a 2,344-seat performance hall whose French Baroque interior drew inspiration from Versailles while reconnecting the Eitel complex with large-scale Broadway production. The Eitel brothers, Rapp and Rapp, Orpheum, RKO, Cinerama, Kimpton and Sonesta form a continuous century-long narrative in which hospitality and performance repeatedly reinvented one another at the same Randolph Street address.
How to fold The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop into your trip.
The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing three radically different architectural expressions of institutional power across the civic core surrounding Randolph Street.
Begin at Chicago City Hall, where Holabird & Roche designed the present City Hall-County Building after its nineteenth-century predecessor was dismantled barely two decades after completion, finishing the county portion in 1908 and the city portion in 1911 as a vast Classical Revival composition measuring 373 feet along each side and rising 200 feet above the street. Continue to Richard J. Daley Center, where Jacques Brownson of C. F. Murphy Associates completed the civic complex in 1965 around a Cor-Ten steel tower and plaza that became the setting for Pablo Picasso's untitled 50-foot sculpture, dedicated in 1967 as the artist's first major permanent public work in the United States. Conclude at James R. Thompson Center, where Helmut Jahn of Murphy/Jahn rejected the surrounding rectilinear civic style with a 17-story curving glass structure opened as the State of Illinois Center on May 6, 1985 after a project costing $172 million, organizing government offices around an immense skylit atrium before the building was renamed for Governor James R. Thompson in 1993. The progression moves from Holabird & Roche's early-twentieth-century classicism through Brownson and Picasso's midcentury civic modernism into Jahn's exuberant postmodern experiment, placing The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop within a compact architectural chronology of Chicago's evolving public identity.
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