For more than a decade, about the only occupants who dared enter the once elegant Aurora Hotel were hundreds of pigeons and the occasional rodent.
It’s not hard to imagine the havoc they wreaked on the battered landmark, not to mention the damage caused by the water that poured unimpeded through dozens of broken windows and a leaky roof, destroying gypsum walls and marble floors and virtually everything else in its path.
More than once, Aurora had all but whacked it with a wrecking ball after repeated efforts to salvage the nine-story brick and sandstone building fell through. The city had condemned the historic relic and bought it for $129,000 several years ago after pressuring its owners to board it up,
“To call the building derelict, I think, is a generous term,” said Shauna Wiet, director of the city’s Neighborhood Redevelopment Department.
But preservationists and city fathers refused to give up on the downtown structure, built on an island in the Fox River and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Remember not the flophouse it became in the 1960s after its black walnut walls had been painted unseemly colors and its lush carpeting had long worn to reveal warped linoleum, they said, but instead remember the grandest hostelry and the tallest structure outside of Chicago when it opened amid great fanfare in 1917.
They recently celebrated their perseverance with an elegant 1920s-style fundraising gala inside the lovingly restored hotel lobby and mezzanine. The event was sponsored by the Aurora Historical Society.
Guests saw the painstaking reconstruction done by Chicago-based Harold D. Rider and Associates, the company that bought the hotel for $1 and, with the help of a series of local and federal loans and tax breaks, transformed it into a 56-unit apartment complex for low-income senior citizens. There also is commercial space off the lobby.
Although plumbing and carpentry is new throughout, it’s the lobby and mezzanine that will take old-timers and young folks alike back to the Roaring ’20s when entertainers and famous athletes passed through.
“Some of this was sort of a love affair,” said Rider, who has been involved in similar restorations in West Dundee, Elgin and Chicago. “A lot of people do things for love they shouldn’t do, but we enjoy doing this, and that’s the nature of it.”
Rider acknowledged he sometimes thought the venerable hotel was too far gone to salvage when he began the $5.5 million restoration more than a year ago. Not only did workers find what can only be described as ugly paint covering walnut beams, but much of the ceilings and walls had been destroyed and, of course, virtually every window was gone.
Worse, much of the information detailing original fixtures to the hotel had been lost over the years.
But restorers had the shell of a brick and gypsum building so solid that, even in its dire state, it could remain standing for decades.
“Other than the lobby and the second floor, the building was completely gutted,” Rider said. “We literally drove a Bobcat through each floor and took everything out to the back walls.”
They did find some pictures and old newspaper clippings to guide them. And they found enough bits and pieces of the original hotel that they could reproduce many of the touches it had when it opened.
“The nicest thing about the renovation is they were so true to the original,” said Charles Zine, a spokesman for Citizens to Save the Aurora Hotel, a group formed to do just that.
