Rooms With Memories

The grand Blackstone hotel was a favorite of U.S. presidents, movie stars, smart-set Chicagoans, and jazz musicians. Now, after decades of decline, it's beautifully buffed up and back in business

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Peter Psihas, the director of sales and marketing at The Blackstone, has been in the hospitality industry for 18 years, most recently at a Marriott hotel in Los Angeles. He expects Blackstone employees to share stories about the hotel's rich history with guests. "You will have more of an attachment," he explains. "You'll have a dialogue, which is rare these days because most people are on their cell phones and BlackBerries and ignoring each other." Psihas served as my principal hard-hat guide during the many months I followed construction work at the hotel. Resolutely fit, he sometimes walked down the 23 flights of stairs at the building three times a day, and he expected me to make at least one descent on almost every visit. After a while, clarity emerged from what at first looked like a chaotic obstacle course, and the completion of the project began to seem within reach.

Formerly an attic that held the machinery for the elevators, the 23rd floor was gutted and the equipment was moved to the roof. That floor will be the apex of the top four Hubbard Place levels, where rooms will range from $324 to $634 a night; the two suites will go for $2,700 and $3,000. Guests on those floors will have access to a lounge and daylong opportunities for nibbling and imbibing. With the exception of the presidential and the smoke-filled-room suites, all the guest rooms were reconfigured, Lagrange says, and they now have inviting entry hallways. Rates for standard rooms will range from $199 to $509 a night; the presidential and smoke-filled-room suites will cost $3,000 a night.

Gettys Chicago, a hospitality design and development firm, chose furniture, fixtures, and finishes that are a blend of the classic and the contemporary. "It became important to do something that had staying power," says Ariane Steinbeck, a managing director of Gettys, "that had an element of fun in it, an element of contemporary thought."

Her colleague Meg Prendergast, a senior vice president of Gettys, is even bolder in her assessment. "Hotels that work well have a really good level of sex appeal," she explains. "At the end of the day, you want to feel sexy hanging out in the lobby or at the bar or in your room. You want to feel as if you've achieved a different sort of lifestyle from the one you walked in with."

The Crystal Ballroom offers perhaps the most startling realization of that philosophy. Its wedding-cake splendor—the ornate plaster detailing, the sparkling chandeliers and sconces—has been restored. But Gettys has pumped up the volume with a rug in brilliant red and orange; at its center is a huge multipetaled chrysanthemum. The rug is Warholesque, a Monet-gone-mad masterpiece. Hot stuff!

Another crucial member of the gung-ho Blackstone turnaround team is Joel Straus, a Chicago-based art consultant. Although he has conceived visual programs for buildings such as McCormick Place South and the convention center in Washington, D.C., this is his first hotel project. The fifth-floor Art Hall will display rotating exhibitions of work by students, initially from the nearby Columbia College. By the end of February, Straus was close to completing the installation of about 1,600 works by 21 contemporary artists, most from Chicago, in The Blackstone's guest rooms and public spaces. Among the contributors are Brian Dettmer, Ann Worthing, and Richard Hull.

"We believe that hotels do not have to have lousy art," explains Isenberg, the president of Sage, a corporate museum sponsor in Denver. "Walter felt that the art was going to be a big player in the interiors," Straus says, "a big part of the overall design. And the budget was certainly greater than what most hotels have."

Most of the works in the guest rooms are high-quality digital reproductions of paintings and photographs for which the artists receive royalties. Michael Hernandez de Luna contributes sheets of perforated postage stamps featuring past presidential guests and other iconic figures. For the lobby, Lincoln Schatz has created a computer-generated video work. Cameras on the roof will record scenes from the lakefront and Grant Park and send collaged images of the landscape to two 50-inch plasma-screen monitors behind the reception area. A plan to film guests entering The Blackstone was abandoned when it was decided that some might be engaging in surreptitious visits.

Only one suitcase of archival material remained when Sage bought the hotel. Because the papers include personal correspondence that belonged to Evelyn S. Nelson, the publicity director of the hotel from the late forties through the early seventies, it's possible that these limited remnants of the Blackstone's history came from her files. A press release from 1949 announces a four-week engagement at the hotel by the singer Lena Horne; a menu and program from 1953 memorializes the poet Carl Sandburg's 75th-birthday celebration in the Crystal Ballroom. Copies of the local high-society magazine Townsfolk from the fifties are filled with photographs of old-money Chicagoans at swell events in the Blackstone—ladies' lunches, debutante balls, fashion shows, formal weddings.

Decades later, two institutions anchored the hotel with their long runs. From 1980 to 1995, the impresario Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase drew raves from critics for performances by greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, the Count Basie Orchestra, Betty Carter, and George Benson. In a theatre across the lobby, Shear Madness, an audience-participation whodunit set in a hair salon, lasted for 17 years, reviled by critics and revered by fans. Apparently there was never an aesthetic contretemps at the Blackstone between attendees at the club and the musical. "They would all mix and mingle at intermission," says Wayne Segal, the son of the founder and now the president of the Jazz Showcase (scheduled to reopen at Dearborn Station in May). "It was one of the liveliest lobbies in the city."

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Photograph: Courtesy of The Blackston—A Rennaissance Hotel

This article appears in the April 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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