Seelbach Hotel

About this property

The Seelbach Hilton Louisville is an historic hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. Founded by Bavarian-born immigrant brothers Louis and Otto Seelbach, it opened in 1905 as the Seelbach Hotel, and is designed in the French Renaissance style. The hotel has hosted numerous celebrities, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who took inspiration from the Seelbach for a hotel in The Great Gatsby. The hotel is part of the Hilton Hotels & Resorts chain. Louis Seelbach and his brother Otto emigrated from Frankenthal, Germany, a small, rural town in Bavaria. Louis arrived in Louisville in 1869 at age 17, shortly after reaching the United States. He worked in the first Galt House Hotel for a time. He turned 22 in 1874 and opened the Seelbach Bar & Grill that year, which he quickly built into a flourishing enterprise. The restaurant's success and Louisville's quickly expanding population and economy allowed him to bring his brother Otto from Germany to help open the first Seelbach Hotel in 1891 above the bar & grill at 6th and Main. The brothers were intent on building Louisville's first grand hotel: a hotel reflecting the opulence and old-world grandeur of European hotels in cities like Vienna and Paris. They formed the Seelbach Hotel Co and purchased a piece of property at the corner of 4th and Walnut (now Muhammad Ali Boulevard) streets. They broke ground in December 1903, and the Seelbach Hotel opened its doors on May 1, 1905, just in time for the Kentucky Derby. On opening day, over 25,000 people visited the hotel. The Seelbach hosted a gala that evening, with dinner parties in each of the 150 rooms. The structure incorporated marble from Italy, Germany, and France, along with wood from the West Indies and Europe. The hotel attracted large numbers of patrons in its first two years, and, luckily, the Seelbach Realty Company—formed in 1902 before the property purchase—had been planning from opening day to expand the hotel. On January 1, 1907, the second phase opened, raising the number of rooms to 500. The lower two floors of the ten-story structure were faced with stone, while the upper floors were brick. Work included enclosing the rooftop garden to allow it to be used as a winter garden. The Seelbach regularly hosted guests of the Kentucky Derby. In 1925, Louis Seelbach, president of the Seelbach Hotel Co., died. On April 1, 1926, Chicago-based businessman Abraham M. Liebling bought the hotel for approximately $2.5 million. In 1929, he sold the hotel to the Eppley Hotel Company for $2 million. Mr. Eppley, of Omaha, Nebraska, owned many hotels throughout the Midwest. He sold the Seelbach, along with his other properties, to Sheraton Hotels in 1956, as part of a $30 million deal. This made the Seelbach part of the second largest hotel sale in US history at the time. The hotel became the Sheraton-Seelbach Hotel, but its name was soon shortened to just the Sheraton Hotel. Sheraton sold the hotel, along with seventeen other aging properties, to Gotham Hotels in 1968, and it regained its original name. Following a severe national economic slump, the hotel closed in July 1975, after the owners went bankrupt.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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