Saving the Park Inn: The Last Frank Lloyd Wright Hotel Still Standing

More than 400 buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright still stand — homes, museums, schools, churches, offices. But only one of his hotels survives: the Park Inn Hotel in Mason City, Iowa.

The bank and hotel in 1977. Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS IA-78-1.

A commission from a school visit

Mason City attorney James E. E. Markley met Wright while visiting his daughters at the Hillside Home School in Spring Green, Wisconsin, run by Wright’s aunt. Impressed by Wright’s design for one of its buildings, Markley and his partner James E. Blythe commissioned him to design a business block with their law offices, a hotel, a bank and shops.

Construction began in spring 1909 and was finished in August 1910 under William Drummond, Wright’s chief draftsman, after Wright abruptly left for Europe. There Wright published the design in the Wasmuth Portfolio, a collection of his drawings that influenced many European architects — the massing of Walter Gropius’s Model Factory at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne is nearly identical.

Two buildings under one roof

Wright designed the City National Bank (east) and the Park Inn Hotel (west) as essentially separate buildings joined by the line of a heavily projecting roof slab, each symmetrical and linked by a narrow waist. Facing Central Park — one of Iowa’s few urban green spaces — the building was given windows to take in the view.

• The hotel, U-shaped around a glass-roofed atrium, had small rooms with shared baths; a basement gentlemen’s room for reading and correspondence; a main floor with lobby, shops, lunch room, bakery, café and kitchen; a mezzanine where an orchestra played; and a ladies’ parlor and balcony over the park. The local paper called it a “model whether in the domain of eatery or sleepery.”
• The bank, a symmetrical box of brick piers topped with organic ornament, was lit by skylights and clerestory windows. It was closed at street level and open above — the reverse of the hotel — a contrast that critics have praised as beautifully resolved.

Decline

Remodels for new tenants took their toll. In 1926 a new bank tenant removed the clerestory windows, added a second floor with double-hung windows, lowered the main floor to street level and cut display windows into what had been a sixteen-foot-high solid masonry wall.

The hotel closed in 1972, the year the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its upper floors became apartments the next year, without drastic changes. But years of poor maintenance followed; in 1988 the city moved the tenants out, and by 1999 the Iowa Historic Preservation Alliance listed the building among Iowa’s 10 most endangered historic properties.

The bank under renovation in 2010. Photo by Melissa Vandelac, National Park Service.

Rescue

In 2000, Mason City won a Save America’s Treasures grant — a National Park Service matching-grant program for nationally significant historic properties — for the hotel. After the nonprofit first handed the project back to the city, citizens formed Wright on the Park, Inc., which took ownership of the hotel in 2006 and the bank in 2007 — the first time in over seventy years the whole building had one owner — and won a second Save America’s Treasures grant for the bank in 2008.

Since 2000 the roof was replaced, the building stabilized, the exterior cleaned and repointed, the terra cotta restored, and the hotel lobby’s mezzanine balcony, removed around 1915, put back. Lost features resurfaced: a Wright-designed skylight from behind the front desk turned up in the attic of one of the original owners’ homes and was restored.

Terra cotta detailing on an exterior column. Photo by Melissa Vandelac, National Park Service.

The plan used both halves as a boutique hotel, banquet hall and community center — 22 rooms in the original hotel and 6 in the bank, enlarged to modern standards, with a restaurant, bar, meeting rooms and an elevator — and returned the exterior to its original design.

Why it matters

As the only surviving Wright hotel, the Park Inn is seen as the prototype for his Imperial Hotel in Japan and Midway Gardens in Chicago, and the City National Bank is considered the better of Wright’s two surviving banks. Together they exemplify the Prairie School: rectangular forms, horizontal lines, cantilevered roofs and open interiors.

Sources

Based on "Restoring the Last Frank Lloyd Wright-Designed Hotel," by Melissa Vandelac, National Park Service, first published in Exceptional Places (Vol. 5, 2010), Midwest Region Division of Cultural Resources; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations it takes from modern books and from Wright on the Park are rewritten in hubnx’s own words.