For decades, the Bismarck Hotel has been sort of like the dame at the end of the bar. Nobody really pays much attention to her until all the cuter ones are gone, and then she starts looking pretty good.
Big and bulky, befitting the German-inspired name, food and decor it sported since it was built in 1926, the Bismarck sat on the fringe of first class, just as it sat on the fringe of the Loop, nudging the northwest corner of the elevated tracks. At 171 W. Randolph St., it stood a few blocks from the real center of the action of theaters, fancy hotels and big-name eateries.
But the Bismarck endured, even as its more famous and sophisticated counterparts faded away. The Sherman House with its famous College Inn and Well of the Sea made way for the James R. Thompson State of Illinois Center. The Morrison Hotel, elegant and well-mannered, fell for the towering First National Bank of Chicago building. The LaSalle Hotel, a longtime watering hole for financial tycoons, unceremoniously was razed to make way for a modern office building.
And then there was the Bismarck, virtually unchallenged west of State Street as the last big hotel.
But what time couldn’t change, a major facelift, a ton of money and new ownership will.
Monday, after a yearlong closure and major surgery, the Bismarck, named after a historic German chancellor and lodged in Chicago history as a big, burly and, by some descriptions, decaying relic of the past, will become …the Hotel Allegro.
Allegro — by definition brisk, sprightly, cheerful. In other words, all the things the Bismarck has not been in the recent past, as it sought to achieve a new identity and life in the North Loop.
But that was not always so. There were times, and they were many years ago, that the Bismarck Hotel was a social and theatrical hub.
In the mid-1970s, in fact, the Bismarck became the unofficial seat of power in what was then still a Democratic Machine-run town. The fabled Cook County Democratic Organization had, for years, headquartered in the Morrison Hotel, but when that hotel was torn down, the party moved to the Sherman House and then to the LaSalle and then to the Bismarck, the only game in town close to City Hall.
How close? Across the street, actually, counting the Metropolitan Office Building that has been part of the entire Bismarck package, along with the connecting theater, for more than 50 years.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ald. Tom Keane, the “Old Professor,” whose wealth had increased along with Mayor Richard J. Daley’s power since 1955, lunched there daily. Daley had accumulated all of the political power on the basis of holding the jobs of mayor and head of the Democratic Party. Keane, as chairman of the City Council Finance Committee, became a millionaire in real estate, thanks to his connections.
Keane finally went to jail after a federal grand jury investigated his financial records and found he had used his powerful City Council position to increase his lucrative property holdings.
It was the joke around City Hall at the time that the feds could have nailed Keane earlier if they had just gone into the Bismarck’s famous Walnut Room restaurant after one of the alderman’s daily lunches and confiscated the tablecloth. Keane was known for mixing eating with business, and often could be seen writing out numbers on the white tablecloths, head close together with that of another business associate, plotting, figuring and eating the heavy German food.
A lunch hour at the Walnut Room in the Bismarck in the mid-1970s would have been a glimpse into the power structure of the times. Keane would always be at the same table, which even had a private phone installed for his use. Daley often would come by to chat, on the way to the 5th floor hotel suite that served as Cook County Democratic Party headquarters. Then-Secretary of State Michael Howlett was a regular, and 1st Ward Democratic Committeeman John D’Arco could often be seen there, although he more often dined at the Counselors Row restaurant in the adjacent office building around the corner. There was a “hospitality table” for Loop Alcoholics Anonymous members off in one corner, and lesser political types would come in to sample the ambience and inhale the power. This was a steak and bourbon place, a Chicago place, not a tourist site.
Its roots ran deep into Chicago’s soil.
German immigrants Emil and Karl Eitel first opened a hotel at 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in 1892, but they built a new and better one on Randolph Street in Chicago’s burgeoning Loop area in 1894. By 1926, they had grander plans, so they knocked down the first Bismarck and built a new one, this time with the adjacent Palace Theater and the 20-store Metropolitan Office Building,
The bands that played there were big, headed by names like Ted Weems and Art Kassel. The entertainment was vaudeville, and the food was German, especially in the Swiss Chalet restaurant that at one time featured young men in lederhosen and young women in puffy skirts and blouses.
Born during Prohibition, the Bismarck didn’t really get to show its stuff until 1933, when liquor sales were once again permitted.
One minute after midnight at the end of Prohibition, the Eitel brothers tapped open the first legal keg of beer in Chicago.
“Unlike other hotels, the Bismarck began serving beer a few minutes after midnight,” reported a newspaper account of the times. “The first twenty barrels delivered in the loop were unloaded there. The Walnut room, where the wild-haired Bert Gilbert performs as master clown, was the scene of such festive cheer as has not been witnessed in a Chicago hotel or cafe since the armistice. Every guest was orderly but riotously happy. Nearly all donned the paper caps made in imitation of a beer mug with the printed slogan `Happy Days.’ “
It was a great night for the Bismarck.
In the years to come, the Bismarck claimed such innovations as having been the first totally air-conditioned hotel and the Midwest’s first hotel with room telephones.
The Eitel brothers eventually sold their prized Bismarck in 1956 to Arthur Wirtz, the sports promoter who owned the Chicago Blackhawks and the Chicago Stadium. Already, by then, it had been on the decline, with much of the glamor of downtown Chicago shifting to the Michigan Avenue giants such as the Conrad Hilton, the Congress and the Blackstone, and the ever-popular Palmer House on State Street.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the era of giant Loop movie houses was about over. Even the Palace Theater, which had been redubbed the Bismarck Theater and featured movies instead of vaudeville acts, closed. Its movie seats were ripped out, and it became a kind of big dining hall.
In his final years, Mayor Richard J. Daley would take over the theater, by then known as the Pavillon Room, for his spirited pre-election Democratic precinct captain rallies. Flanked by a double dais of Democratic candidates, Daley would stand in front of his huge army of political warriors and admonish them to “Work, WORK, WORK!!!!,” driving them out into the neighborhoods with the motivation to win even bigger than before.
But then Daley died, and, by most measures, so ultimately did the local Democratic Party, at least as far as its traditional structure went.
And the hotel went through a series of half-hearted renovations, opening and then closing a big band room, a jazz club, the Walnut Room, the Swiss Chalet.
The theater’s worst moment probably came in November 1984, when the one-hit-wonder band “Frankie Goes to Hollywood” was performing and the makeshift dance floor gave way, spilling concertgoers to the floor below ground and forcing the theater’s closing.
But on Monday, coincidentally, the day before Election Day–not to mention St. Patrick’s Day, with all of its Chicago political significance–the Bismarck that time couldn’t sink will change names and images. It will become the Hotel Allegro, where a doorman will sound a trumpet at 9:01 every morning to signal the start of the workday. The rooms, the lobbies, the restaurants have all been redesigned and renamed.
The old dame at the end of the bar has a new look as of next week, and, with all of the others gone, she’s looking pretty darned good after all.
