It's re-purposing carried to the
extreme.
The Marquette Regional History Center
needed a newspaper article last week, and I was able to toss one off
for them in 20 minutes. How? Well, I took one of the scripts I had
written for my “Pieces of the Past” video series, added a few
words to it, and turned it in. It ran in yesterday's Mining Journal,
which means that I can now share it with you here. So this will be
the third time something I wrote a few months ago has shown up in
different formats.
If only ALL my writing was this easy.
By the way, I have tomorrow off so
there won't be one of these. Have yourself a great holiday weekend!
*****
MARQUETTE'S “HOTEL ROW”
Anyone who's ever been in Marquette is
familiar with the Janzen House. The Janzen, for a long time, was a
traveler's hotel. In fact, it was one of four such buildings that
once sat on the 100 west block of Spring Street, a block that for a
span of over sixty years was home to Marquette's “Hotel Row”
Why that particular block of Spring
Street? Well, the hotels were located there because of their
proximity to the Main Street train station. Until 1948, when that
train station closed and a new passenger terminal was opened on Fifth
Street, visitors and business people could just hop off the train,
walk a few feet to the establishment of their choice, and check in.
The first of the hotels, built right
after the station itself, was the The Merchants Hotel. Constructed
by Karl Rohl on the corner of Third and Spring, the Merchants was a
three story wooden structure. When it first opened you could get a
room at the Merchants for $5 a week. If you wanted to bump that up
to ten dollars a week, they'd feed you meals, as well. Or course,
there was one caveat to that great price.
You had to be a man to be a guest at
the Merchants Hotel. At least when they first opened, they wouldn't
allow women to check in.
 |
| Merchant's Hotel. Photo courtesy Marquette Regional History Center |
The hotel hung on for a few years after
the train station moved but ended up closing in the 1950s. It was
replaced by a new A&P Store,a building that still stands as the
home of the Marquette Regional History Center.
Right next to the Merchants was the
Windsor Hotel, which sat it what is now the site of a city parking
lot. Opened by Peter Kremer in 1891, it changed its name to the
Central House three years later. The smallest of the Spring Street
hotels, the Windsor stood out from the others by having an in-house
saloon and by having a horse barn built in back. It was, mostly
likely, downtown Marquette's first parking garage.
 |
| Windsor Hotel. Photo courtesy Marquette Regional History Center |
The Windsor closed in 1915.
On the other side of the street sat two
hotels that were almost mirror images of each other, the Janzen and
the Brunswick. The two hotels were built around the same time, in
the late 1880s, and even shared a small courtyard. The Brunswick was
a slightly bigger facility, and had what one newspaper article of the
time called “one of the finest dining rooms in all the city”.
Like the Merchants Hotel, the Brunswick suffered after the closing of
the downtown train station in 1948. It did hang on for another
twenty or so years, eventually becoming a long-term hotel, where
retired workers and indiividuals without other housing would live.
After catching fire a few times, the structure was eventually torn
down in the late 1960s. It was replaced by law offices and another
parking lot.
 |
| Brunswick Hotel. Photo courtesy Marquette Regional History Center |
The one ex-hotel that's still standing
on Spring Street is the Janzen. Like the others, once the train
station moved it too changed its clientele. Like the Brunswick, it
became more of a home for retirees and transients. It did manage to
host one final famous visitor, though, as in the late 1960s a high
ranking government official from Czechoslovakia came to NMU to speak
on the superiority of the Communist system. Through a mix up, he was
booked at the then-seedy Janzen, a stay that probably did nothing to
change his mind about the excesses and failures of the capitalist
system.
A public fundraising campaign in the
early 1980s brought much-needed capital to repair the then crumbling
structure. Since then, the Janzen has been used as transitional
housing for individuals looking to re-enter society. One of the
oldest remaining buildings on that block, it stands as the final
testament to what was once Marquette's “Hotel Row”.
