Hotels That Made History

Farhad Heydari September 11, 2007

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Prior to that conflict, during the height of the First World War in nearby St. Petersburg, the Grand Hotel Europe was used first as an orphanage and later, during the 900-day siege of Leningrad from 1941-1944, as a much-needed hospital providing up to 1,300 beds for patients. Some hotels would have played a much larger, however sinister, role if history had unfolded in a different way. Consider the Greenbrier in West Virginia, which features a bunker fashioned during the Cold War that was to house members of Congress in the case of a nuclear attack.

Mostly, though, hotels have been places where history of a good kind has been made. At the longest continually running hotel in the U.S., the Omni Parker House in Boston, John F. Kennedy announced his intention to run for public office; he later proposed to Jackie in the hotel’s dining room. And at another Fairmont property, this one in San Francisco, the year was 1962 and the setting was the hotel’s ornate Venetian Room when Tony Bennett first performed what would become his signature tune, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” The same hotel was also where delegates met in 1945 to draft the U.N. Charter.

The Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro had plenty of outrageous Hollywood tales and scandals from the Carnival balls and New Year’s parties. The national landmark, located on the famed Copacabana Beach, was where Ginger Rogers danced the night away; another instance saw Ava Gardner taking up residence in the hotel after a drunken rampage forced her to leave her original hotel at 2 a.m. On discovering water shortages in Rio during his stay, Orson Welles demanded bottles of mineral water be delivered to his room so he could bathe.

But conflicts seem to have put most properties on the map, like the Villa San Michele in Florence, which as a Franciscan monastery was requisitioned by Napoleon as headquarters during the invasion of Italy in 1808. And during the Anglo-Boer war, it was at Cape Town’s Mount Nelson Hotel where General Kitchener held strategy meetings, and where a young Winston Churchill roamed the corridors looking for stories as the war correspondent for The Times of London. In later years, he would retire regularly to the gardens of La Mamounia in Marrakech, which he called the “loveliest spot on Earth.”

See our slideshow of Hotels with History.

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