1978 - Amarillo Hotel Demolition With a series of explosive blasts, the “Pride of Amarillo,” the Amarillo Hotel was reduced to a pile of rubble April 10, 1978. Once known as headquarters for cattlemen, oil barons and railroad tycoons, multi-million dollar were said to be made in the restaurant and lobby. Built in 1922, the once grand Amarillo Hotel outlived its usefulness, falling into disrepair and eventually become nothing more than a pigeons roost. The Amarillo Hotel originally opened in a wooden structure in 1889 on the 3rd and Polk site. A 1910 fire destroyed the original wooden framed hotel killing two, a 17-year-old mother and her daughter. The brick hotel was built in 1922 was considered the heartbeat of the Amarillo Business district when the population stood around 17,800. Charles Pryor, who managed the hotel from 1936 to 1947, once told of a Chicago salesman, amazed at the informal nature of business deals conducted at the hotel, accosted him saying: “Charles, I just saw $22,000 worth of calves change hands between to cattlemen in 20-gallon hats and not a word was written down for a contract. It all happened over a couple cups of coffee.” Pryor described cattlemen thusly; “They were all down-to-earth folks. Cattlemen size you up in a jiffy. You can’t pull high society on them and you can’t tell by looking how smart or wealthy they are.” Hotel maid Dorcas Johnson reminiscing on life in the hotel during the 1920’s: “The cattlemen’s yearly conventions were most colorful when they danced from noon till midnight as piano and fiddlers played the same songs over and over,” she said. Tips ran as high as $15 and $20 in those days and cowboys sometimes took target practice at the indoor lights. The dinning room of the Amarillo Hotel was the town’s social center. “Famous for Food,” was the hotel slogan. Gen. Ernest O. Thompson builder of the hotel, built a garden on the roof of the hotel, where is wife, May Peterson-Thompson, a metropolitan Opera prima donna, held social teas. Fort Worth attorney Ira Butler bought the hotel when it was auctioned in 1965, the year the hotel was closed. In February of 1970, Amarillo National Bank bought it from Butler and exchanged it for the old Teepee Western Store at 411 S. Polk. Mesa Petroleum acquired the hotel in April of 1970. A letter to the editor in the October 27, 1968 Amarillo Daily News from Robert Park, a former Amarilloan, said: “…I was much depressed on my last trip home to find that this once grand and glorious edifice had been discarded by the city. It stood hollow and empty with a “For Sale or Rent” sign in the window. No one seemed to care that the city of Amarillo was throwing away its most important heritage. Does anyone have a heart? Who will save Amarillo’s famous landmark.” The site of the famous Amarillo Hotel is now home to the Maxor Building. The visually spectacular ending to this grand hotel paled in comparison to its magnificent history.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 06:56:03 +0000
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