The Palmer House, Burned Down Thirteen Days After It Opened

The hotel on your left opened twice, about a year apart, in the early eighteen seventies. Potter Palmer built this grand hotel at State and Quincy as a wedding gift for his bride, Bertha Honoré, meant to anchor Chicago's rise as a retail capital. It opened in September of eighteen seventy. The Great Chicago Fire reached it the following October, and the brand new Palmer House burned to its foundation along with most of downtown.

Palmer rebuilt immediately, this time two blocks away at State and Monroe, borrowing one point seven million dollars, reportedly the largest loan ever extended to a private individual up to that time. This new Palmer House, finished in eighteen seventy five, was advertised as the world's only fireproof hotel, proof that Chicago intended to rebuild itself in brick and iron rather than wood. The building standing on this site today dates to nineteen twenty five. According to the hotel's own telling, it was here in eighteen ninety three that Bertha Palmer asked a pastry chef to invent a dessert small enough to pack into a boxed lunch for ladies attending the World's Columbian Exposition, something that needed no plate and no fork. The result became known as the brownie, though historians note the name itself was not used in print until years after the fair, which makes the exact chef, and the exact moment, harder to pin down than the legend suggests. Conrad Hilton bought the property outright in nineteen forty five for twenty million dollars, and the name on the awning changed, but the fireproof ambition Potter Palmer built into this corner never did.