hotelcongresscentennial Z Photo courtesy of Hotel Congress.
Hotel Congress with three floors.
continues... MARCH 18, 1918 - Bids to build the new hotel open. Prominent Tucsonans Judge William H. Sawtelle, Leo Goldschmidt and Mose Drachman agree to finance the project. The group plans to install “modern equipment” in every room. The new building is heralded as the first “flatiron” hotel in the southwest; a reference to other iconic buildings of the time resembling the shape of a flatiron. Most notably the Flatiron Building in New York City.
APRIL 2, 1918 - The bid is awarded to Edwards and Reilly, contractors from Flagstaff. John Latz wins the lease and plans to open the hotel the first week in October. He returns to Chicago for furniture and fittings. The hotel’s design includes three stories containing eighty-four rooms and a roof with thirty lockers and several baths.
APR 25, 1918 - A competition to name the new hotel is announced. Although presented as being open to the public, Latz encourages “Spanish-speaking people” to enter the competition. Excavation for the hotel’s basement nears completion and cement for the foundation is poured.
Photo from Arizona Historical Society, BN33,163b.
Hollywood, who then ventured off to more remote venues in the foothills and desert. Latz’s hotel did a thriving trade for a decade and a half, but even so it went into receivership in the grim years of the Depression—strange, since the money started to roll in when the Tap Room opened its doors practically the minute that Prohibition was repealed in 1933. It was the first bar to open in downtown when the law changed, though others followed, and it attracted bibulous crowds to rival those that frequent the Tap Room—now called Tiger’s Tap Room, after the legendary bartender Tom “Tiger” Ziegler, at work there since 1959—today. (See article on page 35.) In January 1934, the hotel, now under new ownership, suffered a fire that would enter it in the annals of modern crime. On the evening of the 23rd, the dining room manager, William Humason, was preparing to open for business when he noticed smoke, then licks of flame, coming up from behind a baseboard. A guest had already called the Fire Department, and when firefighters arrived they tried to put the fire out with a small extinguisher, thinking the fire was just the result of a carelessly discarded cigarette and easily contained. As it happened, the fire had built up in the basement owing to a malfunctioning furnace, and the whole of the understructure of the hotel was burning, the flames traveling up a chimney to the floors above. Humason gathered some of the hotel’s valuable records, then went up to his room on the third floor to retrieve a prized violin. He shouted the whole way up and back, noting that a few occupants seemed reluctant to leave. He got out of the hotel just in time for the stairs to catch fire, requiring the evacuation of a few guests by ladder, “having not been warned in time to escape through the hallway,” as the Arizona Daily Star reported. The Star added that one guest, having been told that the fire was out, returned to his room on the second floor and was never seen again. He may have added to the then
Hotel Congress, after the fire. The third floor was never rebuilt.
APRIL 30, 1918 - Dorit Dinkel is one of several contestants who submit the winning name “Congress,” admitting that her suggestion was an afterthought. Nevertheless, she wins the competition when her number is drawn from a hat. John’s Latz’s hotel officially becomes the Congress Hotel. NOVEMBER 18, 1918 - The Congress Hotel formally opens its doors to the public. It is described as Tucson’s “war bride” hotel since it is the only building of significant proportions built during war time. It proudly advertises “one hundred elegantly furnished rooms, all of them outside ones, single and en suite, and has seventy five bathrooms, tub and shower. It has a telephone in every room, steam heat and elevator service.” SEP 20, 1918 - Field and Parker Company mortgage one safe to Hotel Congress for $750.
1919 - Newspaper ads begin to refer to the newly founded business as Hotel Congress rather than the Congress Hotel.
continues...