Casino news source: Indy Star - http://www.indystar.com
Hotel ready for 1st guests since 1932
Associated Press
WEST BADEN SPRINGS, Ind. -- Seventy-five years after its last guests checked out, the West Baden Springs Hotel is ready for a grand reopening next week that will cap a $90 million restoration that's returned the domed structure to its former glory.
Wednesday's reopening of the century-old hotel is eagerly awaited by residents of the southern Indiana town who once feared the structure would collapse from neglect.
"A lot of people didn't think it would be a hotel again, so this is bittersweet for the community. Now that it's operating again, it's mind blowing," said Dyan Welsh, a spokesman for the French Lick Resort Casino complex that includes the West Baden hotel.
The hotel's 246 guest rooms boast modern updates such as flat-panel TVs and wireless Internet access. Forty of the rooms have balconies overlooking the hotel's soaring atrium.
When it opened in 1902, the hotel was dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World" with six floors of rooms looking into a 100-foot-high atrium capped by a 200-foot-wide dome.
Until the Houston Astrodome opened in 1965, it was the world's largest free span dome.
For 30 years, it competed with the French Lick Springs Hotel a mile away for well-to-do and celebrity guests, including Al Capone and Gen. John J. Pershing. But the stock market crash dried up business and it closed as a hotel in 1932.
Two years later, it was sold for $1 to the Jesuit Catholic religious order, which used it as a seminary until the 1960s.
Empty for more than 20 years, it had become an elegant ruin by 1991, when an outside wall caved in, leaving the entire structure in danger of collapse.
Bloomington billionaire Bill Cook, and his wife, Gayle, pumped $34 million into shoring up the hotel, which has been a National Historic Landmark since 1987, and making it marketable for Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana.
The Cooks, the founders of medical device maker Cook Group Inc., later created a nonprofit foundation to partner with Lauth Properties Group of Indianapolis to win a state riverboat casino license.
The $382 million casino project has restored the splendor of both the French Lick and West Baden hotels about 40 miles south of Bloomington. West Baden's imposing Moorish towers were rebuilt. The project included upgraded golf courses, riding stables, spas and other amenities.
Steve Ferguson, CEO of Cook Group, said about $90 million was spent on the West Baden site, including a replica of an indoor pool and spa blown down by a windstorm in the 1920s. At night, a computerized light show now bathes the interior dome in different colors.
"A lot of people who grew up around here or were Jesuits cry when they come back," said Joe Modaffari, a front desk supervisor. "It means so much to them." |
|
