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Sagas of the Shire: Recalling the Wendell Hotel

The expanded Wendell hotel had nearly 300 rooms. Photos Courtesy of the Berkshire Athenaeum and www.billtague.com.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — With the opening of the new Hotel on North in the renovated former Besse Clark building, downtown Pittsfield will enjoy the option of more than one hotel establishment for the first time in decades.

The condition of hosting a solitary hotel in the city's center is one that many residents have become accustomed to, but historically has not been the standard there, where multiple competing establishments flourished even in an earlier age of far less population, and fewer area attractions to draw the interest of visitors.   

The Maplewood Hotel, the Berkshire Hotel, Kenney Hotel, Burbank Hotel, Norwood Hotel, and the more recent Allen Hotel are just a few of the establishments that operated in competition with other lodging in the city's downtown during the 19th and 20th centuries. A fire inspector's report to city government in 1907 indicates that there were at least nine hotels operating simultaneously at that time.

All of these, though, are eclipsed in history by the celebrated Wendell Hotel, once the largest in the city's history at 323 rooms.

The corner of South and West Streets from which the city's largest current hotel has dominated the skyline since 1970, has actually been the site of visitor accommodations for nearly 200 years. Abner Stevens was the first to open an inn at this site, around 1823, though exact records are unclear. Abner sold it on to his son Angelo in 1846, at a price of $6,100, and the latter Stevens renamed the place the Exchange Hotel.  

A new manager, Peter Springstein, had changed the name to the United States Hotel by 1858, but not long after tragedy marred its reputation. It was in the downstairs kitchen of this establishment on the night of Sept. 19, 1862, that one Jane Collins, a worker there, was brutally murdered by her husband with a bayonet. At the trial, a long history of abuse by husband William was recounted, such that for some time Jane had ceased to go home at night, and had been living at the hotel for some time. She appeared to be attempting to escape the marriage at the time when Collins stormed into the hotel kitchen and things took their final tragic turn.

In 1866, the property was sold to a trust for $30,000, on the condition that a new hotel be built there. Several prominent local businessmen made an attempt at this, but the goal would not come to fruition for more than 30 years, when the property was acquired by a 23-year-old Pittsfield native and recent Williams College graduate by the name of Samuel Wells Bowerman.  

Bowerman had a bold vision to do something spectacular for his hometown. He engaged local architect H. Neil Wilson to design the 110-room hotel in the Renaissance style, out of grey limestone and yellow pressed brick. Called "a monument of architectural and financial ability," Bowerman's Wendell Hotel fronted 62 feet on South Street and 152 on West Street, where a heavy plate-glass door trimmed in brass opened to the vestibule and a marble staircase to the second floor. A main dining room with seating for 250 ran the whole length of the western end of the structure.

The hotel's grand opening on Sept. 30, 1898, was a glittering event that far exceeded the expectations of its proprietor. More than 800 attended, including a Who's Who of local business luminaries and public officials including Lt. Gov. W. Murray Crane. Two full orchestras were brought in from Albany, N.Y., to provide entertainment.  

"It was a matchless night," according to a Berkshire Eagle account of the affair. "The moon shone down with its refulgent rays and the stars twinkled their approbation of the scene being enacted."

For all the fanfare of its opening, initial success was elusive for the hotel, whose owner lacked sufficient operating capital needed for the enterprise. Bowerman was forced out soon after, and went on to a variety of exploits elsewhere — active for a while in the aerospace and automotive industries, Bowerman also established a chocolate plantation in Honduras, and then became immersed in the Florida building boom in the 1930s and '40s.
 
New principals Arthur Plumb and George Clark took up its lease in January 1899, until the firm Hamilton & Cunningham took on a five-year lease the following year. A variety of owners and managers followed, until in 1924 it came under the management of Napoleon Campbell.

The aptly named Napoleon was a man of short stature and considerable executive skill. During his 20-year tenure, the hotel reached its height of success and growth. Campbell promptly added a 65-room central wing, a new ballroom, and a number of streetside retail spaces. In 1930, another 115-room addition on the south expanded it further, followed by 33 more rooms with the renovation of an annex building on West Street.  

The life of the the Wendell, like any prominent hotel, was a tapestry of individual moments and memories.  

In August 1900, reporters from around the country and even Europe filled its rooms as they flocked to Pittsfield to cover what they were then calling "the crime of the century," the still-unsolved murder of May Fosburgh, daughter of prominent industrialist Robert Fosburgh. With its close proximity to the courthouse and telegraph office, and its formidable tap room, travelling newshawks unanimously chose the Wendell. They kept it bustling through the trial and ultimate acquittal of May Fosburgh's brother the following summer.

In 1919, controversy ensued when manager Arthur Brunelle let go all the African-American waiters in two of its smaller dining areas, replacing them with French waiters. The remaining waitstaff in the main dining room protested, going on strike on March 4. Unmoved by the action, Brunelle refused any negotiation with the striking workers, arranging for waitresses from employment agencies in New York and Worcester. It marked the first time in 15 years the hotel employed white service staff in its dining rooms.

This aroused some significant consternation against the Wendell and further complicated racial tensions in Pittsfield, but the hard feelings were not permanent. Forty years later, the NAACP would celebrate its 50th anniversary at the hotel.

The original Wendell Hotel built in the 1890s is on the left; at right is a section of the building still left during its razing in the 1970s.

Some local newspeople fondly remembered another occasion, when The Berkshire Eagle held its holiday party in the Stanley Room.  

"Along about dessert time, one of the younger members of the staff was moved to a demonstration of physical agility," recalled Thomas Morton a few years later. "He leaped on the long table, ran its entire length, and ended with a perfect full somersault."

The hotel served a number of notable guests over the years — though no President ever slept there, John F. Kennedy did lodge there on a number of occasions, while still a senator. A number of sports celebrities spent nights there, among them boxers Jack Dempsey and Jack Sharkey, golfers Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones Jr., wrestler Gus Sonnenberg, and baseball player and coach Al Schact, as well as a brief stay by coach Connie Mack and the Philadelphia Athletics in 1935, the first time a Major League team ever played in Berkshire County.  

Acclaimed novelist Sinclair Lewis was at first refused a room at the hotel when he spilled into the lobby rowdy and inebriated late one night, having visited several taverns between New York and the Berkshires that evening.  After some degree of pleading by the writer's exasperated chauffeur, Campbell consented to let him stay. A few days later, the manager received from Lewis a note of thanks and an autographed copy of "Work of Art," his novel about a protagonist working his way up in the hotel business.

Finally, no fine hotel's history feels fully complete without a jewel thief somewhere in the mix, and in 1950 the Wendell had its own to add to the legacy, when a professional burglar broke into the room of a traveling salesman and made off with $8,000 worth of custom jewelry.

Campbell retired in 1944 and sold the hotel to the Sheraton company for $550,000, as the 18th hotel in its growing chain. In 1954, J. Joshua Goldberg purchased it and renamed it the Wendell-Sherwood, but the Sheraton reacquired it a few years later, running it up until the time of its closure.

April 1, 1965, was a day of sadness and nostalgia for many as the grand old hotel breathed its last.  

It's final guest was Helen Cain, who had been a permanent resident at the hotel for 11 years. Cain came down to the lobby that morning to pose for photographers, accompanied by Captain of the Bellhops Andrew Powell, a 42-year employee of the Wendell. Cain had relocated to the hotel from New York's Ritz Carlton, where she'd spent 24 years prior, and moved to Dalton's Crane Inn thereafter.

From early afternoon into that evening, some of the hotel's most faithful regulars gathered in the lounge to say their farewells.

"They hoisted a few flagons, sang a mournful song, and bemoaned the fates that fell us all," according to the Eagle, some of whose staff were among the final crowd that helped close the bar at 10 o'clock that night.

Demolition began that summer, clearing the site for a proposed "modern motor inn."  

Berkshire Life Insurance Co., which had 68 years earlier issued to Bowerman the $100,000 loan to build the hotel, had reacquired the property to see it through to this new development. At first, a Holiday Inn looked to be in the works, but ultimately it was Hilton that purchased the site a couple of years later, constructing a new 14-story, 175-room hotel that opened in 1971. Now the Berkshire Crowne Plaza, it is the city's tallest building, persisting through Pittsfield's jarring economic decline and the proliferation of several smaller motels along the town's far southern corridor.

Aside from a couple of houses re-purposed into small bed & breakfasts, no new lodging establishment had opened since 1998, until recently a reassessment of the local tourism industry sparked renewed interest in establishing new accommodations. Several local entrepreneurs in talks with both the Marriott and Hilton corporations set off the so-called "Hotel Wars," a fierce competition which raged across local committee and court proceedings during 2013 to 2014. In its aftermath, the newly reorganized Main Street Hospitality Group, which operates hotels in Stockbridge, Williamstown and North Adams, announced plans for the new boutique hotel set to open on North Street.

To the delight of the local Historical Commission, the Hotel on North proprietors have gone to great lengths to preserve and restore many elements of the building. Adding to this, general decor decisions have given nod to earlier periods in such a manner that hopefully its operation will restore a bit of the feel of historic hotel glamour lost with the destruction of the noble Wendell Hotel.

The writer of this column, Joe Durwin, has recently launched a campaign on Indiegogo.com to fund the publication of a new collection of writings on local folklore and history.

"These Mysterious Hills: An Unauthorized History of the Berkshires" represents the culmination of more than a decade of writing on all things weird in the Berkshires and surrounding area, and covers a wide array of curiosities from three and a half centuries of recorded history in the region.

It will include updated editions of the longtime Advocate Weekly column of the same name, along with material published in Haunted Times, FATE Magazine, iBerkshires.com, the North Adams Transcript and tons of new, never before printed material. By shining a spotlight on the area's more unusual episodes and legends, Durwin believes it will enrich knowledge of local history while attracting new tourist interest in the region.

Check out a video on the project and rewards available to supporters of the book here.

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