Monday’s sale of the Arlington Hotel at Hot Springs marked the end of hotel ownership for Southwest Hotels Inc., which once had a large portfolio of famous hotels in this region of the country.
The company, founded by H. Grady Manning, once owned the Arlington Hotel and the Majestic Hotel in Hot Springs; the Marion, Grady Manning, Albert Pike and Lafayette in downtown Little Rock; and hotels in Memphis, Vicksburg and Kansas City.
Grady Manning was born in March 1892 in rural Scott County, attended a business college in Fort Smith and began working in the dining room of a Fort Smith hotel to help pay the cost of his education.
“Discovering he enjoyed working in the hotel business, he moved to Hot Springs, where he took a job at the Eastman Hotel,” Nancy Hendricks writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “With the town’s thermal waters said to offer medical benefits, Hot Springs became known as the Spa City and was one of the premier resort destinations in the country during the early 20th century. Many of its visitors were affluent travelers who had taken the waters at the leading spas of Europe and expected superior service at lodgings in Hot Springs.
“Manning traveled to Niagara Falls, Canada, where he was employed as a clerk at the Queen Royal Hotel, which was said to be one of Canada’s most exclusive. Manning became renowned for his outstanding service and courtesy, a reputation that followed him when he returned to his home state of Arkansas.
“In 1917, he became assistant manager of the Marion Hotel in Little Rock. The hotel was named for the wife of its founder, Herman Kahn, who built the Marion in 1905. At eight stories high, it was the tallest building in Arkansas until 1911. In 1919, Manning became manager of the Basin Park Hotel in Eureka Springs, a popular summer resort. His success there led to his being named manager of the Goldman Hotel in Fort Smith. In the prosperity of the 1920s, Manning formed Southwest Hotels Inc, which then sought ownership of a number of landmark hotels. Manning married Ruth Seaman around this same time.”
Herman Kahn, the Marion Hotel founder, had moved to Little Rock from Frankfurt, Germany, in 1870. Kahn’s great-grandson, Jimmy Moses, has been the driving force behind many of the developments in downtown Little Rock in recent decades. Kahn and his sons, Sidney L. Kahn Sr. and Alfred G Kahn, were heavily involved in banking and real estate development. Sidney Kahn developed the Prospect Terrace neighborhood of Little Rock.
The 500-room Marion Hotel, designed by architect George Mann, had green carpets, bellboys in green uniforms and a marble fish pond in the lobby. The Marion billed itself as the Meeting Place of Arkansas. Indeed many of the state’s top organizations held their conventions at the Marion. Its bar was named the Gar Hole and featured a huge, mounted alligator gar. Well-known visitors to the Marion through the years included Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Helen Keller and Will Rogers. The Marion sometimes was referred to as the real state Capitol since legislators congregated there during legislative sessions, cutting after-hour deals and forging compromises.
Writer Richard Ford, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1996 novel “Independence Day,” once lived in Room 600 of the Marion. Ford was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1944. Beginning in 1952, Ford spent summers in Little Rock with his maternal grandparents. Ford’s grandfather, Ben Shelley, was the hotel manager.
“It created for me a nice sense of comfort because I knew everybody,” Ford said in a 2013 interview with the Arkansas Times. “Everybody was family — all the bellmen, all the telephone operators, all the front-office people, all the cooks, all the waitresses, all the waiters. And yet all around that little island of home-like experience, there were all these people coming and going, day in and day out, people I would never see again. I could lie in my bed, and I could hear the buses coming and going from the Trailways bus station. Down behind the hotel, I could hear the Missouri Pacific switch cars. I could hear voices out on the street. I could hear sirens. I never thought of it as lonely.”
Southwest Hotels owned the Marion in its final decades. The hotel closed in early 1980 and was demolished along with the Grady Manning Hotel (also owned by Southwest Hotels at the time) on Feb. 17, 1980, to make way for the Excelsior Hotel (which later became the Peabody and then the Marriott) and the Statehouse Convention Center. Little Rock television stations provided live coverage of the implosion of the two hotels on a cold Sunday morning.
The Grady Manning Hotel had opened in 1930 as the Ben McGehee Hotel. It was designed by architect Julian Bunn Davidson and originally was owned by Benjamin Collins McGehee.
The Lafayette Hotel in downtown Little Rock opened in 1925 and closed in 1973. Now known as the Lafayette Building, it houses offices and condominiums.
Little Rock was experiencing solid growth during the 1920s, and an entity known as the Little Rock Hotel Co. decided to capitalize on that growth with a new hotel. A.D. Gates of St. Louis was the company president, and John Boyle of Little Rock was the vice president. The 10-story structure, which has a full basement, was designed by St. Louis architect George Barnett.
The Lafayette opened on Sept. 2, 1925, with 300 fireproof guest rooms. The rooms, which featured private baths with running water, rented for $2.5o per night. The building’s exterior featured elements of the Renaissance Revival style of architecture with its decorative terra cotta detailing, arched windows on the top floor and a projecting copper cornice. The interior public spaces were designed by decorator Paul Martin Heerwagen.
The Great Depression hurt the hotel industry, and the Lafayette closed in 1933. The building remained vacant until a housing shortage due to an influx of soldiers at Camp Robinson increased the demand for hotel rooms and apartments. The Lafayette was purchased by Southwest Hotels and reopened on Aug. 23, 1941. Southwest reduced the number of guest rooms from 300 to 260. A coffee bar and lunch counter were added with an entrance off Sixth Street.
An Arkansas Gazette article the day after the opening said: “Guest rooms, suites and efficiency apartments are the newest, freshest and most livable rooms in the city, high above the street, light and airy.” The newspaper described the coffee bar as “truly the most beautifully decorated and artistically designed coffee bar in the state.”
The interior of the hotel was completely repainted. The lobby ceiling was stenciled and painted by John Oehrlie, a Swiss mural painter. Oehrlie and his crew redecorated the hotel in eight months, spending three months of that period working on the lobby ceiling. Oehrlie had been Heerwagen’s foreman in 1925 so he was familiar with the hotel.
After the renovation by Southwest Hotels, the Optimist Club, Lions Club, Kiwanis Club and Civitan Club all began having meetings at the hotel. The Missouri Pacific and Rock Island railroads had ticket offices in the lobby. There also was a telephone answering service, a coin shop and a beauty parlor. The Gaslite Club opened in the basement and remained in business until the 1960s.
There was yet another remodeling effort in 1953 as the hotel’s owners tried to keep up with the growing number of motels and tourist courts on the highways leading in and out of Little Rock. Mechanical, electrical and plumbing updates were made. The interior decor was changed to incorporate a red-and-white color scheme. The Lafayette closed as a hotel on Nov. 23, 1973. The Gazette described it as the “victim of more modern competition, one-way streets and no parking facilities.”
The Albert Pike, meanwhile, operated as a hotel from 1929-71 when Little Rock’s Second Baptist Church bought it for $740,000 and transformed it into a residence hotel. The block on which the hotel was built once had been occupied by a house constructed in 1827 for Robert Crittenden, the secretary of the Arkansas Territory. The Crittenden House was among the first brick residences built in Little Rock. Facing financial problems, Crittenden attempted to trade the house for 10 sections of undeveloped land, hoping the brick home would become the site of the territorial capitol. Foreclosure followed Crittenden’s death in 1834, and the house was sold to Judge Benjamin Johnson, whose heirs later sold it to Dr. E.V. Dewell. Dewell, in turn, sold it to Gov. James P. Eagle, and it was the official governor’s residence from 1889-93. The Crittenden House was razed in 1920.
The 175-room Albert Pike was constructed at a cost of almost $1 million. The hotel was built in the Italian-Spanish Revival style, which was popular in California at the time. It featured tiled roofs, exposed beams, decorative inside tile, iron work and stained-glass windows. The hotel is among Little Rock’s last remaining major examples of this type of architecture.
At the time the Farrell Hotel Co. opened it, the Albert Pike was considered to be one of the finest hotels in the South. Architect Eugene John Stern designed two main wings of eight stories each that extended toward Scott Street and were connected across the back by a 10-story section. Above the entries were terra-cotta medallions with heraldic shields and the initials “AP.” The two-story main lobby was overlooked by a mezzanine that featured a custom-made Hazelton Brothers grand piano designed to match the building’s interior features. Officials of the Farrell Hotel Co. decided to name the hotel after Albert Pike, a prominent lawyer who died in 1891. Pike, a central figure in the development of Freemasonry in the state, was a poet, writer and Confederate commander in the Indian Territory during the Civil War.
In Hot Springs, railroad executive Samuel Fordyce joined forces with Samuel Stitt and William Gaines to build the first Arlington Hotel as the area around the springs gained in popularity.
“The original hotel was located across Fountain Street from the current Arlington, a site that’s now a public park,” Michael Hodge writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “The first location was unique in that it was the only hotel property on the original Hot Springs National Reservation land. In 1893, to keep up with other nearby hotels such as the Eastman, Majestic and Park, the Arlington was razed and rebuilt on the same site with a more elegant design, a larger guest capacity and updated amenities.
“On April 5, 1923, an employee of the hotel noticed smoke coming from an electrical panel. Authorities were notified as a fire slowly began to spread. William Pinkerton, the founder of the famous security service and a guest at the hotel at the time, was so certain that the fire would be controlled that he sat on the veranda and smoked a cigar rather than retrieve his belongings, all of which he eventually lost to the fire that leveled the building.
“The owners had been discussing building an addition across Fountain Street. The plans for this now became plans for rebuilding the entire hotel on that site, thus removing it from reservation property. On Nov. 28, 1924, the third and current version of the Arlington Hotel was completed. Designed by George R. Mann, primary architect of the state Capitol, the building’s entrance faces the southeast corner of the intersection of Fountain Street and Central Avenue and includes two massive towers like its predecessor but designed in a Mediterranean rather than Spanish Revival style.”
Southwest Hotels purchased the Arlington in 1954.
What became the Majestic was built in 1882 on the site of the old Hiram Whittington House. It was known as the Avenue Hotel at the time. The name was changed to the Majestic in 1888. A yellow-brick building was added in 1892. The original hotel was razed in 1902 and a brick building with 150 rooms was added. A new restaurant known as The Dutch Treat was also added with a replica of a windmill over the door.
“In the prosperity of the 1920s, greater numbers of average Americans could visit the Majestic Hotel,” Hendricks writes. “In addition, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Red Sox stayed at the hotel for spring training and fitness programs. … During this era, the legendary Babe Ruth frequented the Majestic. The in-house thermal baths at the Majestic also appealed to notorious 1920s underworld figures who did not have to leave the hotel for their spa therapy.
“The year 1926 saw the addition of the eight-story annex (a red-brick building to the west of the yellow-brick building), which later housed the Grady Manning Dining Room. … Southwest Hotels purchased the Majestic in 1929. … In the 1940s, the U.S. Army used the Majestic to house World War II-era soldiers. On Dec. 15, 1945, the hotel reopened to civilians. It attracted celebrities such as actor Alan Ladd, comedian Phyllis Diller and orchestra leader Guy Lombardo.
“After Hawaii became a state in 1959, all things Hawaiian became popular. The Majestic opened the Lanai Tower in 1963. The Lanai suites were said to boast the first modern sliding-glass doors. The suites surrounded a waterfall and tropical-themed pool. With the completion of the Lanai Tower, the Majestic became an eclectic mix of architectural styles — traditional red brick, the yellow-brick building and the tropical-themed Lanai suites. As was the case with most of downtown Hot Springs, business at the Majestic steadily declined through the 1980s due to a combination of highway rerouting, medical advances that made spa bathing outdated and the cessation of illegal gambling in the city.”
Southwest Hotels closed the Majestic in 2006. The yellow-brick building burned in a huge fire in February 2014. The remainder of the hotel, which was boarded up and deteriorating badly, was torn down last year.
H. Grady Manning was only 47 when he died in Hot Springs on Sept. 4, 1939. He reportedly drowned. The Little Rock City Council passed a resolution saying that Manning would “always be remembered as a man of the highest integrity and devotion toward the welfare of his community, the state and the nation.”
His widow continued to operate Southwest Hotels before passing the company on to the couple’s only child, Joy Manning Scott, who died in June 2014. She grew up in her family’s hotels and later married Morin Scott, living in Austin, Texas. The couple was married for 55 years.
Control of the company passed to Monty Scott, the son of Joy and Morin Scott.
Monty Scott, who was born at Austin in 1949, worked for a time at the investment firm Goldman Sachs and in the oil and gas industry before joining Southwest Hotels. He died unexpectedly in January 2016. Soon afterward the Scott family began entertaining offers for the Arlington, the last hotel under the auspices of a company that once had owned 10 hotels.
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