The Perry Hotel: Last of Twenty-One

On the corner here stands the last of its kind. In eighteen ninety-nine, just four years after Petoskey became a city, a man named Norman Perry opened this hotel. Perry had been a dentist, but the story goes that he gave up dentistry after a patient died following a tooth extraction, and he turned to the hospitality trade instead.

His timing was perfect. The resort boom was at its height, and around nineteen hundred Petoskey had more than twenty hotels packed with summer visitors arriving by train and steamer. Perry built his hotel of brick, a real novelty at the time, and advertised it as the only fireproof hotel in town.

That brick construction may be exactly why it survived. Of the roughly twenty-one hotels operating here at the turn of the century, the Perry is the only one still open today. It anchors the heart of the Gaslight District, Petoskey's historic downtown, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

More than a century of guests have watched the sun set over Little Traverse Bay from its windows. It remains a living landmark of the town's grand resort era.