A Hidden Wonder Of The World
ONE OF THE most visible innovations in late-twentieth-century architecture has been the huge unsupported dome. In the familiar form of the domed stadium it has popped up across the continent. The era of domed stadiums began in 1965, with the opening of the Houston Astrodome. Yet an unsupported steel-framed dome of breathtaking size has been standing since the very beginning of the century in southern Indiana, far from any metropolitan center. It was built not to protect sports fans from the elements but to fulfill a businessman’s whim.
Col. Lee Sinclair of Salem, Indiana, was a man of vision and a shrewd entrepreneur. He amassed a fortune from his numerous business interests, including a jeans factory and a bank. In 1888, a year after railroad service reached the area, he bought an inn built almost four decades earlier in the neighboring town of West Baden Springs. (The original owner had named the town after the famous German spa at Wiesbaden; its less Continental former name was Mile Lick.) Sinclair set about transforming his inn into the West Baden Springs Hotel, an elaborate operation with five hundred rooms.
The main lure for visitors was the abundance of sulfur springs, which gave the area its nickname of Springs Valley. Guests came by the hundreds to seek the supposedly miraculous cures obtained by partaking of the waters. (Paul Dresser is said to have written “On the Banks of the Wabash” while a guest at West Baden.) In 1893 a hotel brochure listed more than fifty diseases that the Sprudel waters, as they were called, would ameliorate, among them alcoholism, asthma, bruises, constipation, female complaints, gallstones, gout, hives, indigestion, influenza, obesity, paralysis, pimples, and rheumatism.
Sinclair made many improvements around the old hotel. He built a Catholic church, a casino, an opera house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, and scattered pagodalike springhouses about the grounds.
All this disappeared in about an hour in an earlymorning fire on June 14, 1901. Afterward, Thomas Taggart, the opportunistic owner of the rival French Lick Springs Hotel, announced major expansion plans. In response, even though he was nearing seventy years of age, Sinclair decided to rebuild his resort around a fireproof hotel that would be the most elegant in the country. His proclamation that the new West Baden Springs Hotel would open within a year was roundly derided.
Sinclair envisioned the centerpiece of his pleasure palace as a huge atrium covered with an unsupported dome 130 feet tall and 200 feet in diameter. (The dome of the Pantheon is 142 feet across; that of St. Peter’s, 137 feet.) Several architects, after consulting with Sinclair, declared that a structure of the size he had in mind could not stay up: The dome would be too heavy to support its own weight, and the expansion and contraction of the steel in southern Indiana’s extreme temperature shifts would wrench it apart. However, a young architect from West Virginia named Harrison Albright thought he could make Sinclair’s vision work. He chose Oliver J. Westcott as architectural engineer, and they hired the construction firm of Caldwell and Drake of Columbus, Indiana, to build the structure for $414,000. The company agreed to complete the project within two hundred days, with a penalty of $100 per day for exceeding that time.
As designed by Albright, the hotel’s core was a sixteen-sided building, with each side sixty feet long. The dome in the middle had steel ribs fanning out from a central hub to pillars around the edge, with glass panels between the ribs. The twenty-four ribs weighed eight and a half tons each, and the glass in the dome required three and a half tons of putty to lay. The problem of thermal expansion and contraction was solved by placing the ends of the ribs on pivots that could roll up and down a track as the temperature changed. The pivots were mounted on six-story reinforced-concrete Ionic columns, five feet in diameter, around the periphery of the dome. It would be the largest clear-span dome in the world, retaining that status until the Astrodome opened.
The new hotel had six floors with a total of 708 rooms. Each floor had an inside and outside circle of rooms separated by a hallway. The inner rooms faced the central atrium, as in today’s Toronto SkyDome, while the outer ones offered views of the surrounding countryside. Each guest room had a private bath, hot and cold running water, steam heat, a telephone, and electric lights.
A force of 516 men worked on the construction of the hotel. The material requirements were staggering: 45 carloads of steel, 13 of stone, 187 of sand, 62 of cement, 26 of lime, 242 of cinders, 51 of lumber (for temporary scaffolding), 450 of white brick, and 16 of red brick for trim. Four tons of lead and zinc went into the paint used on the interior walls. Albright demonstrated his confidence in his creation’s most radical feature on the day it was completed by climbing out on the dome while the huge supporting scaffold was being dismantled. As the final supports were removed, he stood atop the dome waving his arms, to the cheers of spectators assembled for the occasion. And true to Sinclair’s promise, the first invited guests were welcomed on the anniversary of the fire. The new West Baden Springs Hotel opened to the public on September 1, 1902, after completion of finishing touches.
The spring waters remained the chief attraction for tourists, but growing criticism of medical quackery forced the resort to place greater emphasis on its recreational facilities. To keep drawing guests, Sinclair installed one of the world’s largest sets of bells and chimes in the atrium, added formal gardens, redecorated all the rooms, gave the atrium a face-lift, and replaced its floor with a marble mosaic made up of more than four million one-inchsquare tiles.
New furniture in the Pompeian Court, as the atrium was called, included marble benches and tables, custom settees, and Tiffany lamps. Other improvements included an immense new lighting fixture in the dome’s hub, a frieze around its top patterned after the mosaic floor, statues of the four Muses in Caen stone on onyx pedestals, and a Rookwood pottery facade on the huge atrium fireplace, which could accommodate logs fourteen feet long.
SINCLAIR DIED IN 1916. Shortly afterward World War I vastly increased government demand for military hospital space, and in 1918 the hotel became U.S. Army General Hospital No. 35. After the war the hotel reopened, but in 1923 Sinclair’s daughter Lillian sold it to a local man named Ed Ballard for a million dollars. Ballard had made his fortune operating several of the valley’s numerous illegal casinos, a trade that continued to thrive along with the hotel until the stock market crash of 1929. Ballard kept the hotel open through the disastrous seasons of 1930 and 1931, when a dozen or so guests per night rattled around inside the huge structure, making it seem more like a mausoleum. It closed in 1932, never to operate as a hotel again.
In 1934 Ballard sold the hotel for one dollar to the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits —to establish a seminary, and their tenancy marked the beginning of a downward slide in the appearance and condition of the structure. The opulent surroundings were hardly in keeping with the order’s emphasis on prayer, humility, and asceticism, so the carpeting and most of the furnishings were removed, the mineral springs were capped, and the hotel’s four imposing Moorish towers were removed. Rabbits took over the weed-choked gardens, and the main lobby became a chapel. The one addition was a cemetery for Jesuit personnel, which is still maintained today.
The Jesuits occupied the place until 1964, when decreasing enrollment and increasing deterioration in the structure dictated a move to Loyola University in Chicago. The old hotel remained empty until 1966, when it was sold to a Michigan couple, who in turn donated it to the Northwood Institute, a business college. The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1987. Northwood occupied it until 1983, when maintenance costs became prohibitive. After Northwood moved out, the onetime West Baden Springs Hotel was once again empty. It has remained so ever since.
Various redevelopment schemes came to naught, and by 1991 the neglect had become so acute that a six-story exterior section collapsed. An emergency infusion of funds from private donors and the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana prevented further deterioration.
In 1994 a Minnesota firm bought the hotel for $500,000 with the intention of opening a casino, but Indiana’s legislature declined to pass the necessary laws. Last year the Historic Landmarks Foundation acquired the hotel for $250,000. It is now performing stopgap repairs while searching for a permanent owner.
The West Baden Springs Hotel poses an unusual set of problems for anyone who considers restoring it. Getting the place back in working order might cost $50 million or more. Beyond that, its great size and unusual architecture create substantial continuing maintenance expenses while limiting the possibilities for what preservationists call adaptive reuse. Without the added lure of gambling, mineral springs are, to say the least, not much of a draw. And without something to attract visitors, seven hundred rooms and a two-hundred-foot dome in a sparsely populated area add up to one of the nation’s largest white elephants.
STILL, BOOSTERS IN Springs Valley, along with preservationists everywhere, are optimistic. If funds can be raised, they will spruce up the hotel enough to give a hint of what it would look like in its fully restored splendor. That should suffice to make some prospective buyer fall in love with the place, and eventually, it is hoped, love will translate into money. The West Baden Springs Hotel may never return to its former status as the Carlsbad of America. Yet with luck its grandest monument will avoid tumbling into the oblivion inhabited by Prohibition, invalids taking the waters, and other distant echoes of its golden age.
