Ladies' Night in the Penthouse
| Last night, the ladies of CREW toured the newly renovated 3,400 SF penthouse at the Palmer House Hilton. Behind this longest continuously operating hotel in North America, there's another great woman : Bertha Honore Palmer, whose husband, Potter, opened the hotel as a wedding gift to her. (And for the first anniversary present? We don't know, but it had to be a letdown.) |
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We snapped Palmer House's Ken Price in the penthouse, near Bertha's picture, answering queries from Mauge's Ginna Ryan. The four-bedroom suite has played host to the Clintons and the Dalai Lama. The architect for the $177 million hotel renovation was Loebl, Schlossman & Hackl, and owner Thor Properties is largely women-operated. Designers tried to keep the original owners intent in mind when renovating the space. History lesson: Bertha's influence extended beyond the hotel to the women's pavillion of the Columbian Exposition in 1894, where she introduced then-radical ideas like suffrage and birth control. |
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The ladies of CREW stopped in for drinks at Potter's, the hotel's bar. The walls behind Builders Bank's Joyce Judah and Dorothy Carr and Keybank Real Estate Capital's Jane Blomquist depict some of the major acts that have played the hotel's Empire Room. (Carol Channing was the most common headliner.) Jane won the Spa Chakra raffle, so she'll be back! |
