The Mount Washington Hotel and the Vanished Grand Hotels
Near Mount Washington Valley, New Hampshire
To the west of the mountain, at a place called Bretton Woods, stands one of the most magnificent buildings in New England, the Mount Washington Hotel. It was the dream of a wealthy New Hampshire businessman named Joseph Stickney, who began construction in nineteen hundred and opened the hotel to its first guests on the twenty-eighth of July, nineteen oh two. Designed in the Spanish Renaissance style by the architect Charles Gifford, with a brilliant red roof, it was built by some two hundred fifty imported Italian craftsmen at a cost of roughly one million seven hundred thousand dollars.
For its era it was astonishingly modern, with electric lights and a private bath in every room. Stickney barely got to enjoy it. He died unexpectedly in December of nineteen oh three, after only a single season.
What makes this hotel so remarkable is that it survived. During the golden age of White Mountain tourism, from about eighteen eighty to nineteen ten, this region held roughly thirty enormous grand hotels, palaces of leisure that could each house hundreds of guests. Almost all of them are gone now, and most were lost to fire.
Wooden hotels packed with lamps and fireplaces burned again and again across the decades. The Mount Washington Hotel is one of only a handful of these grand hotels still standing and still welcoming guests, a survivor from a lost world.
