West Baden Springs Hotel

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West Baden Springs Hotel
Welcome to the Eighth Wonder of the World

By Sarah Hoban

It's a surprising sight for rural southwest Indiana. Next to a hillside in a land of rolling hills and farmland stands an enormous circular palace, capped with a wine-colored dome and crowned with four fanciful Moorish towers.

That's the effect Lee Sinclair intended, anyway, when he built the West Baden Springs Hotel in 1902, and it's what preservationists still envision as they attempt to bring the old resort back to life. Sinclair bought a hotel on the site, built to exploit the valley's mineral springs, in 1888. When it burned down in June 1901, he saw the chance to build exactly what he wanted—and vowed to do so within a year. It was an ambitious feat for any big building, and Sinclair's was not going to be just any big building. His hotel would be a 16-sided structure built around a huge, domed atrium.

To make his vision real, Sinclair hired Harrison Albright, a 35-year-old architect from West Virginia. The hotel opened in September 1902 following 337 days of construction. It had 708 luxurious rooms surrounding a six-story atrium. Overhead, the atrium's 200-foot-diameter, glass-and-steel dome was an engineering feat itself; rollers attached to its steel ribs glided up and down a track to compensate for thermal expansion and contraction. The structure remained the largest free-span dome in the world until the Houston Astrodome surpassed it in 1965.

The structure remained the largest free-span dome in the world until the Houston Astrodome surpassed it in 1965.

Over the next 20 years, Sinclair and his daughter Lillian Rexroad continued to improve and renovate the resort, most notably by transforming the atrium into the Pompeian Court. They added marble benches and Tiffany lamps at ground level, painted an elaborate frieze around the edge of the dome and installed a mosaic made up of 12 million one-inch Italian marble tiles on the floor.

The splendor attracted well-heeled guests, both famous and infamous; financier "Diamond" Jim Brady, boxer Joe Louis and gangster Al Capone all stayed here. The resort added a casino and thrived until the Depression did it in. In 1934 the Jesuits bought the property for $1.00 and operated it as a seminary for 30 years, though they lacked the money for upkeep and the hotel suffered. The Jesuits removed the Moorish towers during the 1940s, capped the mineral springs and took out the formal gardens. The order moved out in 1964, and Northwood Institute, a private college, moved in two years later. Northwood stayed until 1983 (and allowed local boy Larry Bird to host basketball camps in the atrium in the 1980s). After that the empty resort began to fall apart.

When part of the exterior wall collapsed in 1991, the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana spent $140,000 to fix it. The group finally bought the building for $250,000 in 1996 and, along with corporate benefactor/partner Cook Group Incorporated of Blooming-ton, started a multimillion-dollar project to make the property solid enough to put on the market. To date about 35 percent of the restoration is done, at a cost of $29.5 million.

The foundation offers tours of the property to help fund their work on it. Visitors come to see the hotel's centerpiece, the atrium, now returned to its Pompeian glory. The foundation has restored other public areas as well: the gardens, the circular lobby, a lavish dining room. And last October, as crowds watched from the resort's grounds and the streets of West Baden Springs, helicopters lowered four new Moorish towers into place. Designers had replicated them by studying old photos of the building in its heyday. On that sunny Saturday, Indiana's Eighth Wonder of the World got its crown back. Today the West Baden Springs Hotel is for sale for $21.5 million, and its rescuers hope to find a buyer who can finish the restoration and put the property to suitable—and profitable—use.

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