Belmont Hotel

About this property

The Belmont Hotel is a twelve-story residential high rise built as a hotel on the Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1924. At that time it was the tallest building near the Capitol, and concern that it blocked the view spurred height-limit restrictions that are still in place. In 1990 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Madison's first hotel was the American House, built in 1838 on the Capitol Square site where the American Exchange Bank now stands. Over the years other hotels sprang up around town: downtown hotels for legislators and salesmen, resort hotels on the lakeshores, and railroad hotels near the depots. The early 1900s saw growth of state government, the University of Wisconsin, industry, conventions, and auto tourism. All of these drove a need for more lodging space, producing a brief boom in hotel construction. The Belmont was one result, along with the Hotel Loraine and an expansion of the Park Hotel. After growing up on his parents' farm west of Madison, Charles Piper joined a grocery business in 1892 and eventually bought full control of it. He brought in his brother Samuel, and they expanded the store into a chain of retail grocery stores. They brought in two more Piper brothers and added a motorized delivery service in 1904. In 1910 the Pipers moved one of their stores into the Joseph Kaiser Fair Store at the intersection of Mifflin and Pinckney Streets, the corner site where the Belmont Hotel now stands. Across the street they bought the F.A. Ogden Block, an old five-story building with stores at street level and the Madison Hotel above. The Pipers renamed it the Belmont Hotel, and H.H. Hile managed it for them successfully, while the Pipers also opened a cafeteria in the same building. By the 1920s the era of a successful grocery store on the Capitol Square was drawing to a close, and in place of their store, they decided to build a bigger, modern, New Belmont Hotel - a moderatelypriced commercial hotel right on the Square. The Piper brothers financed the $400,000 project largely through the sale of first mortgage bonds to local investors, including many farmers. Madison architects Balch & Grover designed the new Belmont in neoclassical style, with the whole building suggesting one classical column. The basement, first floor, and mezzanine are clad in limestone, suggesting the base of the column. The next eight stories are clad in red brick, suggesting the shaft of the column. Limestone decoration that contrasts with the brick connects the windows into vertical lines, suggesting fluting on the column. The eleventh floor is framed by a metal entablature below and a cornice above - the head of the column. The building's framework is reinforced concrete, and interior walls are hollow clay tile - a fireproof design which was fairly new at the time. The structure was built from 1923 to 1924 by Baily & Kasson Company of Chicago. Inside, the hotel had 200 small rooms arranged so that each pair shared a bathtub to save space. The hotel opened with a flower shop in the lobby and the Old English Room restaurant in the basement, and charged between $2.00 and $3.00 per night for a room.

Location

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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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