United spent another $400,000 furnishing the hotel before it opened. The United Hotels Company of Niagara Falls agreed to lease and operate the hotel if it were completely finished out and serviced by heat and power. In order to raise the entire $1.6 million needed to complete the building, the officers took out second and third mortgages - even while the specter of war was looming. Jemison recruited the Wells Brothers Construction Company of New York City to oversee the building efforts.Īccording to one story, the building's excavation revealed an underground stream, requiring the addition of large steel beams spanning across the opening at enormous extra cost. The ground floor of the courtyard was glassed in and planted as an "orangerie".Ĭongratulating Jemison for their progress, he suggested that, if the other investors were agreeable, the hotel be named "The Tutwiler". The main dining room was decorated in the "Adam style", while the ballroom featured decor in the manner of Louis XVI. The interior featured what the Birmingham Age-Herald proclaimed the "Biggest Lobby in America", furnished with heavy "Elizabethan" furniture and dressed with marble walls. The penthouse was again clad in limestone and crowned with a deep, ornate cornice.
A full balustrade separated this ornate base from the relatively unadorned brick walls of the residential floors above.
The lower floors were clad in limestone and provided with large, multi-story arched windows with deep balconies centered on each street facade. Stoddard and Welton's design was for a large, square block with a central courtyard.
The result blended ideas from the Slaten Hotel in Cincinnati, the Blackston Hotel in Chicago, and the Vanderbilt and McAlpin Hotels in New York City. He and hotelier Robert Meyer visited the vanguard of "metropolitan hotels" in other cities to study their best features and worst mistakes. When he returned from South America, he learned from Jemison that the option had been exercised and New York architect William Lee Stoddard was already working on plans for the new hotel in collaboration with local architect William Leslie Welton. Major Tutwiler tentatively agreed to underwrite the first mortgage bonds. Tutwiler, who had just sold his Tutwiler Coal, Coke, & Iron Company to the Birmingham Coal & Iron Company the year before, and was about to embark on a tour of South America with his wife. At Harding’s suggestion, they approached Major Edward M. Harding, president of the First National Bank, set out to secure the mortgage for the hotel. While Crawford assumed the duties of president of the new company, Jemison and W.
Immediately, Jemison challenged Crawford to join him in building a luxury hotel in Birmingham. Woodward was hoping to sell a lot on the southeast corner of 5th Avenue North and 20th Street, a lot originally bought to prevent the construction of a new office building that would have competed with Woodward’s downtown properties.
Steel came into town they had no decent place to stay. In 1913, George Gordon Crawford, president of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, complained to Robert Jemison Jr that when friends and officers from U.S.