Shoreland Hotel

“The Shoreland Hotel—the largest and most opulent luxury apartment hotel on Chicago's South Side and one of the largest hotels in the city when it was completed in 1926-reflects the significance of the apartment hotel as a new building type that developed in the city around the turn of the century and matured in the 1920s.”

“One of the few nineteenth-century hotels in Hyde Park that did not immediately convert to long -term residential use after the Columbian Exposition was the Chicago Beach Hotel at East 51st Street and South Cornell Avenue, which was among the oldest and most famous summer resort hotels in Hyde Park.”

“The Shoreland Hotel was a major center of Hyde Park social life during the first half of the twentieth century. During the fifty years that it served as a luxury apartment hotel, the Shoreland hosted such famous (and infamous) individuals as Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Capone, Jimmy Hoffa, and Elvis Presley.”

“The hotel operated its own upholstery shop in the attic to service the $2 million worth of furniture in the building. A barber shop, beauty salon, and convenience shop housed in the first floor of the south wing could be accessed from the lobby or from exterior entrances.”

“From the time of its grand opening in 1926 through the 1950s, the Shoreland remained one of the city's most prominent luxury residential hotels, attracting affluent and well-established Chicagoans as permanent residents (including Frederick Bode, president of the Gage Company, and M. E. Greenebaum, nationally-prominent banker and president of Greenebaum & Sons Investment Company) and a long list of well-known visitors.”

“This vision for the Shoreland-more that of a country manor in a bucolic setting than a piece of the urban fabric was dependent on the completion of a massive lakefront extension and improvement plan that had been in the works since the years following the Columbian Exposition and which, by the early 1930s, had completely transformed the shoreline between Grant Park and Jackson Park.”

“The ten-story Lexington (1891, demolished) was built near Prairie Avenue to house the wealthiest class of visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. These nineteenth-century luxury apartment buildings were among the first in Chicago to combine “the status and services of a hotel" with the premium location of the city's best residential areas.”

“The Shoreland Hotel includes grandly-scaled and finely-crafted interior spaces exemplifying the importance of the building in terms of its building type and history as a grand apartment hotel.”

“The Shoreland Hotel was often referred to as “the Edgewater Beach of the South Side." The Shoreland Hotel and Apartment Hotels in Hyde Park When it was completed in 1926, the Shoreland Hotel was the largest and most opulent of the many apartment hotels in Hyde Park, continuing a tradition of residential building that had defined the community's lakefront since Hyde Park's incorporation as a village in the mid- 1800s.”