One pleasant aspect as you walk back through time on the Historic Downtown Salt Lake City Walking Tour is that you realize there was life before Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton and Embassy Suites.
I have started and stopped along the Utah Heritage Foundation's 58-marker tour off and on for more than a year now, and Thursday the markers numbered 36 through 47 took me to a variety of hotels that were once among the city's finest.
And now aren't.
The lone exception is the Peery Hotel on the corner of West Temple and 300 South. The Peery was a show-off of a hotel when it opened in 1910, and it's still a show-off, with weekday room rates that start at $119 (there's a $69 special on weekends) and top out at $249 for the honeymoon suite.
The other hotels that were built shortly after the turn of the previous century to take advantage of proximity to the Rio Grande Railroad Terminal haven't had the Peery's longevity. The Garden Hotel (1909) on 300 South has become Squatter's Pub & Brewery, the New York Hotel (1906) on Market Street has become the New Yorker and Market Street restaurants and bars, and the Shubrick and Broadway Hotels (both 1912) on 400 South and 300 South, respectively, have become apartments with locked security doors at the entrance. So much for the walk-in trade.
Below the old Shubrick Hotel building on 400 South is the Port O' Call private club.
Old hotels never die, they just fade into saloons.
This "hotel" section of the Historic Walking Tour also features a sharp contrast in major architectural styles between the First Security Bank building on the southeast corner of 400 South and Main and the Frank E. Moss Federal Courthouse on the northwest corner.
The elegant old courthouse was constructed by the federal government in 1906 and is a fine-looking example of neoclassical architecture, while the bank building was Salt Lake's first "modern" skyscraper when it was built in 1955 and is a fine example of why anything built in the 1950s should have had the shelf life of the Edsel. When it was built, the First Security building was likened to the United Nations building in New York, which is also amazingly ugly.
But they could build unsightly buildings in the old days, too. The Oddfellow Hall on Market Street just west of the Moss Courthouse is testament to that. The hall was built in 1891 by the Oddfellows, a secret fraternal organization, which could explain why there are so few windows on the east side of the building and definitely explains why there is an all-seeing eye above the main entrance.
The Oddfellow Hall is also an example of how old things become beautiful, or at least treasured, if they just hang in there. When the Moss Courthouse begins its westward expansion plans in a couple of years, the Oddfellow Hall building is scheduled to be moved, lock, stock and all-seeing eye, across the street at a reported expense of $5 million.
Its new location will be directly east of the New York Hotel/Market Street Restaurant.
As for the Shubrick Hotel/Port O' Call building farther west along 400 South, it was once scheduled to be razed for the courthouse expansion but has since been spared out of respect for its age and history.
The hotel rooms may be a thing of the past, but the building isn't — and there's a Marriott and a Hilton just down the street.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.