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French Lick Resorts, West Baden Hotel

The West Baden Springs Hotel, formerly known as the West Baden Inn, is part of the French Lick Resort and is a national historic landmark hotel in West Baden Springs, Orange County, Indiana. It is known for the 200-foot (61 m) dome covering its atrium. Prior to the completion of the Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955, the hotel had the largest free-spanning dome in the United States. From 1902 to 1913 it was the largest dome in the world. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, the hotel became a National Historic Landmark in 1987. It is a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and one of the hotels in the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Historic Hotels of America program. In 1888 an investment group called Sinclair and Rhodes, which included Lee Wiley Sinclair from Salem, Indiana, and E. B. Rhodes, acquired the West Baden hotel and 667 acres (270 hectares) of land for $23,000. Although the hotel was destroyed by fire in 1891, it was rebuilt, and over the next several years Sinclair bought his partners' interest in the hotel and became its sole owner. Sinclair turned the facility into an elaborate resort. Advertised as the Carlsbad of America, the cosmopolitan resort included a casino, an opera house, and a covered, two-deck, one-third-mile oval bicycle and pony track. A lighted baseball diamond in the center of the track was used as the spring training grounds for several major league teams including the Cincinnati Reds, Chicago Cubs, and Pittsburgh Pirates, among others. The hotel caught fire on June 14, 1901, but no guests were injured. Sinclair invited Thomas Taggart, the new owner of the French Lick Springs Hotel, to buy the West Baden property, but Taggart rebuffed the offer, boasting that he would expand his facility to handle more guests. Sinclair, who was outraged, decided to build a new, circular-shaped hotel that would be fireproof and have a large dome. His goal was to open the new hotel within a year. Most building professionals rejected the idea of a 200-foot (61 m) dome, but Harrison Albright an architect from West Virginia, designed the building. Oliver Westcott, a bridge engineer, designed the dome's trusses. To complete the structure before the first anniversary of the fire, a 500-man crew worked six days a week in ten-hour shifts for 270 days at a total cost of $414,000. The new hotel opened on September 15, 1902, to rave reviews.[citation needed] Its formal dedication took place on April 16, 1903, with Indiana governor Winfield T. Durbin and U.S. Senator Charles W. Fairbanks delivering speeches at the event. Advertisements called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. Hotel amenities included a gambling casino and live theater performance every night, as well as opera, concerts, movies, bowling, and billiards. Palm trees grew in the huge atrium, where birds had free range and guests relaxed on overstuffed furniture grouped in clusters under the 200-foot (61 m) dome. The massive fireplace in the atrium could accommodate logs as long as 14 feet (4.3 m). Outdoors, guests had their choice of a natatorium, two golf courses, horseback riding, baseball, several hiking trails, or bicycling on a covered, double-decked oval track. (At 1,760 feet (540 m), the track was the largest in the country.) To cater to their well-heeled clientele, the hotel's facilities also included a bank and a stock brokerage. A trolley transported guests from the hotel's front door to nearby French Lick. In the spring of 2006, HLFI West Baden deeded the West Baden Springs Hotel to the Cook Group for a token amount in appreciation for the $35 million already invested. Restoration of the hotel resumed in the summer of 2006. The French Lick Springs Hotel and French Lick Resort Casino opened together on November 3, 2006. A gala event on June 23, 2007, marked the reopening of the West Baden Springs Hotel, seventy-five years after it closed. The West Baden hotel's reconfigured space contained 243 rooms and suites, fewer than half of the total in the original structure. The hotel's natatorium was rebuilt using historic photographs as a guide. The total cost of the complete restoration of the West Baden Springs Hotel totaled almost $100 million. Indiana Landmarks holds a perpetual preservation easement on the West Baden Springs Hotel that requires prior approval to make any changes to the hotel's exterior or grounds, even if ownership changes