A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus. Bob HunterЧитать онлайн книгу.
It stood adjacent to the south end of the third (and final) Neil House hotel. Its Morgan pipe organ was one of its features. As interest in “talkies” grew, the Majestic resisted the innovation, advertising itself as the “Shrine of the Silent Art.” Eventually management gave in, though, and for a while it was advertised as an RKO theater. In February 1950, it was torn down to make way for an H. L. Green variety store.
10. West side of High Street, north of State Street—Odeon Hall, owned by William Neil, adjoined the original Neil House hotel and was the site of many early shows, meetings, and concerts. The Ohio House met there from February 1, 1852 (after the old Statehouse burned to the ground), to 1857. Jenny Lind, an opera singer known as the “Swedish Nightingale” who was one of the most famous singers in the world in the nineteenth century, performed there November 4 and 5, 1851, during a tour of America that was originally promoted by P. T. Barnum. When tickets went on sale for the hefty price of $2 to $4, people rushed to buy them, and the performances sold out. More than a thousand men and women crowded the streets around the hall in hopes of catching a glimpse of her.
11. 41 South High Street—William Neil opened a tavern on this site directly across the street from Statehouse Square shortly after his arrival in Columbus in 1818. He also bought a stagecoach line. In 1832, John Noble took over Neil’s tavern, remodeled and elegantly furnished the two-story, green-painted building, and called it the National Hotel. Neil’s Ohio Stage Company had an office attached to it. Noble’s tavern-keeping career began in 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, although he had helped supply the army in Franklinton during the War of 1812. Neil’s stagecoach business grew rapidly, and after the old building was torn down, Neil opened the first of three Neil House hotels on this site in 1839 at a cost of $100,000. In 1842, author Charles Dickens, his wife, Catherine, and his secretary, George Washington Putnam, stayed here; Dickens praised the hotel in his writing, saying he was impressed by “the polished woods of black walnut” and the hotel’s “handsome portico and stone verandah.” When William Henry Harrison was running for president in 1840, he gave an hour-long speech in front of the Neil House. When former president John Quincy Adams visited Columbus on November 4, 1843, he also stayed here. The old hotel was destroyed by fire in 1860 on the night of Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency; it was rebuilt and reopened in 1862. The second hotel contained approximately 150 rooms. Lots of famous people stayed in this building, including Mark Twain, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Jenny Lind, Orville Wright, Warren G. Harding, and Oscar Wilde. The press noted that when Wilde stayed there in 1882, he was served his dinner in Beck’s, a restaurant associated with the hotel that was run by Lawrence Beck. In 1922, that building was torn down for the construction of a third Neil House, which would continue the hotel’s tradition of serving many of the rich and famous until it was demolished in 1981 to clear the site for the construction of the Huntington Center.
12. South High Street, west side of Statehouse grounds—A crowd of fifty thousand attended the September 14, 1906, dedication of the statue of William McKinley, a former Ohio governor (1892–96) who rose to the presidency and was assassinated in 1901. The sculpture by Herman A. McNeil portrays McKinley speaking at the Pan-American Exposition (in Bufalo, New York) just moments before he was shot. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt (who had been McKinley’s vice president) and the wife of an Ohio congressman, was the guest of honor at the unveiling. The statue’s location pays tribute to the devotion that McKinley had for his wife. It gazes across High to the spot once occupied by the Neil House, where the McKinleys lived during his time as governor. Ida McKinley was frail and often bedridden, and every morning as the governor walked to work across High, he would pause near this spot and wave to his wife as she gazed out the second-story window.
13. 21 South High Street—The twelve-story Harrison Building was erected here in 1903 and acquired by Huntington Bank in 1915. The bank’s offices moved there from the southwest corner of Broad and High in 1916, and in 1925 the bank incorporated this building into the much-larger building that still stands on this site today.
14. Southwest corner of Broad and High Streets—In 1820, “a small frame dwelling, then the residence of Mrs. Nashee” occupied this spot, according to historian Alfred Emory Lee. It was later used as a school for the hearing-impaired, referred to then as “deaf-mutes.” In 1878, a Gothic-style, four-story Huntington Bank building rose on this site. In 1916, the bank moved to the new, twelve-story Harrison Building south of here and immediately north of the Neil House. A succession of businesses and restaurants have occupied the single-story building that occupies this site today.
15. Southeast corner of Broad and High Streets—The World War I Commemorative Arch was dedicated on September 18, 1918, with a speech by former president Theodore Roosevelt and music by John Philip Sousa’s orchestra. Roosevelt’s speech promoted the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive.
16. Northwest corner of Broad and High Streets—David Deshler bought this lot in 1817 for the then-exorbitant price of $1,000 (other lots in the new city were going for $100 or $200), and the young carpenter built a wooden house and shop on the site that stood for years. In 1878, David’s son, William Deshler, built the Deshler Block, a four-story brick building that housed the Deshler Bank, storerooms, and offices. In 1912, William’s son, John Deshler, announced plans for a 400-room hotel—269 with baths—that would rival the finest in the world at the time. The Deshler Hotel’s opening on August 23, 1916, was a gala afair: 102 chefs, waiters, and captains were hired in New York and were brought to Columbus in chartered railroad cars, and the 525 guests were entertained by opera stars and an international dance team. The hotel was leased to Ohioans and New York hoteliers Lew and Adrian Wallick and advertised for years as “the most beautifully equipped in America.” Whether it was or wasn’t, there was no denying its elegance. The lobby ffloor was decorated by a mammoth Oriental rug that cost $15,000 in 1927. The Wallicks added 600 rooms in the new AIU building—known today as the LeVeque Tower—next door, which was reached via a “Venetian bridge” at the second-story level. The hotel was renamed the Deshler-Wallick. New York mayor Jimmy Walker came for the opening and tried to have a ceremonial sip of wine in each of the 600 hotel rooms; legend says he almost did it. President Harry S. Truman spoke here in 1946 at a conference of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ. After his presidency, he and his wife, Bess, stayed here on July 6–7, 1953, during a three-week road trip from Missouri to the East Coast and back in a 1953 Chrysler. The hotel was sold in 1947 to Chicagoan Julius Epstein, who sold it five years later to the Hilton hotel chain, and it was renamed the Deshler-Hilton. In 1964 a company headed by Charles Cole bought and renamed it the Deshler-Cole. Cole eliminated the 600 rooms in the LeVeque Tower and remodeled the hotel, but its decline was under way. It was sold one last time to Fred Beasley in 1966 and became the Beasley-Deshler. But it was closed in 1968 and was razed in September 1969.
17. Northeast corner of Broad and High Streets—This spot and the lots to the immediate north were still unoccupied in 1820, eight years after the city was formed. Rufus Main’s grocery store was located here in the period before the Civil War. The animals of Dan Rice’s circus supposedly “wintered” in the upper floors of the building one year. Rice started as a clown and became a household name in America in the middle of the nineteenth century; he became so popular that he ran for president of the United States in 1868. He changed the circus into what it is today by mixing animals, acrobats, and clowns. Roy’s Jewelers was at this site from 1920 to 1985. After the building that housed the jewelry store was declared unsafe during a redesign of the corner, it was torn down in 2005 and replaced by a building that resembles the old structure.