The Dana Hotel: In With the New in Chicago

August 30, 2007 at 9:02 AM | by barbarab | 0 Comments

We know preservationists, hard as they try, can't prevent every teardown that makes way for a new hotel. And we don't believe every single old building should be spared. Yet we feel especially wistful when a teardown involves an old hotel. In this instance, preservationists lost the battle to save the Dana Hotel, built in 1891 as the Erie Hotel.

Before the five-and-a-half story Queen Anne-style building closed in 2005, it had been the longest continually operating hotel building in all Chicago. The River North neighborhood, once in decline, is now prime for development. After some last-ditch efforts to spare the building from the wrecking ball, the hotel was demolished this summer.

Replacing the old Dana Hotel will be the new Dana Hotel. Same name, new look: the 26-story, 216-room property that, judging from the architect's rendering, was no candidate for a "facadomy," which spares the distinctive front wall of a building and incorporates the wall, and the old look, into the new design.

The old hotel's red brick would have clashed too much with the sleek glass-and-steel design that Neighborhood and Development Corp. and Gold Coast Hotels Inc. commissioned. If those two names ring a bell, they're the team behind Hotel Indigo Chicago.

We're guessing that by the time the new Dana Hotel opens next summer, we'll have long forgotten the back story, the little hotel that looked like might have fit right in the Chicago scenes of, say, Some Like It Hot. The new Dana hotel will probably be hopping, with its planned rooftop lounge, lobby sushi bar and a Japanese steak house and sake lounge and a sidewalk cafe. That's the way the old hotel crumbles.

Photo: Architecture Chicago]

Related Stories:
· The Chicago Seven: Hotel Dana [Preservation Chicago]
· A New Dana every Century [ ArchitectureChicago PLUS]

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