“The first thing Paul Cornell did to create a community in Hyde Park was to bargain for a passenger stop from the Illinois Central Railroad. The second thing he did, in 1856, was build a five-story hotel. He realized that a hotel provided essential functions for a community: public rooms to conduct business, a place for the community to socialize and a lure for new visitors with its cooling lake breezes and easy access to the city. These are the features that sustained Hyde Park hotels for 100 years, but it was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition that transformed Hyde Park into a nationally famous hotel district, featuring grand hotels like the Windermere on the northwest corner of 56th Street and Cornell Avenue, across the street from a fair entrance.
“The 1892 Windermere echoed the aesthetic of the fair in brick and limestone, with its neoclassical pediments, Ionic columns and Palladian windows. Inside, it provided every modern convenience. It claimed to be the first hotel to provide telephones in every room. It attracted industrialists like George Westinghouse, whose company provided the electricity at the fair that astonished the world, and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
“After the fair, the area’s hotels asked, “now what?” The Windermere’s answer was to convert many short-term rooms into residential suites, selling off excess furniture to the incoming University of Chicago faculty. Porcelain bathtubs, iceboxes, silver safes, built-in buffets, bookcases, carved mantels and an open floor design gave the rooms a feeling of home, but a home where the worries of laundry, housekeeping and dining were taken care of. It was ideal for people who loved to travel. It was also ideal for women with better things to do with their time, like Edna Ferber, who wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “So Big” while living in the Windermere.
“The hotels competed for business. One advantage the Windermere had was the reputation of its owner, Joseph H. Defrees. He was a wealthy lawyer who served as president of the Chicago Bar Association, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and advisor to U.S. President Warren G. Harding. The fact he lived in his own hotel guaranteed its quality. In the winter months, the university embraced the Windermere’s public rooms for events, and filled its guest rooms with visiting teams and their fans through its enormous athletic program. In the summer months, the hotel marketed its cool lake breezes and access to Jackson Park’s gardens, lawn tennis, boating, horseback riding and golf.” (Morse, Hyde Park Herald, 1/28/25)