The Hotel Jerome is located on East Main Street (State Highway 82) in Aspen, Colorado, United States. It is a brick structure built in the 1880s that is often described as one of the city's major landmarks, its "crown jewel". In 1986, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is operated by Auberge Collection.
It was built by Jerome B. Wheeler, then co-owner of Macy's and a major investor in Aspen during its early boom years. He wanted the city to have a hotel that equaled European ones in its refinements and amenities. It was one of the first buildings west of the Mississippi to have full electric lighting and it has the only above-ground ballroom in Aspen. It was the only hotel to remain open through the city's "quiet years" in the early 20th century, as a family business run by a former bartender and his son that often served as the town's social center.
During Prohibition, a celebrated spiked drink, the Aspen Crud, was invented at its J-Bar. Later, the drink and bar became popular with members of the Tenth Mountain Division while they trained in the area. After the war, Aspen and its new ski resort became a popular destination for celebrities vacationing there. Gary Cooper and John Wayne often stayed at the Jerome, and it became known as a place where they and the locals freely mingled. Hunter S. Thompson used the J-Bar as his de facto office; later the hotel ballroom hosted his memorial service. Bill Murray partied there while portraying Thompson in a film, and the J-Bar also inspired a song by Glenn Frey, who often went there with his bandmates while a member of The Eagles.
Building The Jerome occupies a lot on the northwest corner of the North Mill Street intersection. The neighborhood is densely developed with many other commercial properties. Some of them, such as the Pitkin County Courthouse two blocks to the east, Aspen City Hall to the southeast, Collins Block and Wheeler Opera House to the south along Mill Street, have been listed on the Register themselves. At the opposite end of the block, across the street, is the Thomas Hynes House, a former miner's cottage now used as a restaurant and also on the Register. To the north, the terrain, level between the hotel and the slopes of Aspen Mountain, begins to slope gently toward the Roaring Fork River, which flows through Rio Grande Park two blocks to the north.
The building itself is a three-story 12-by-11-bay brick structure, with a small hyphen connecting the main block to a north wing of similar shape and size. Both are topped by a flat roof. The slight grade to the north exposes their basements slightly. Jerome B. Wheeler built it in 1889 during Colorado's silver boom, and it was designed to emulate the grand European hotels of the period.
Its south (front) facade has a wooden hood, topped with a balcony balustraded in turned wooden spindles and supported by narrow iron columns, covering the sidewalk at the centrally located recessed main entrance. It is flanked by two small aspen trees on either side of the street. Smooth round columns on square bases support a molded cornice with metal letters spelling "Hotel Jerome" on the east and west.
The middle six bays of the facade project slightly, separated by pilasters with foliated caps, forming a tall arcade. On either side of the front entrance are large windows with a small rectangular pane atop a larger one. All have sills of locally quarried rough-cut peachblow sandstone, which continues around the building as a stringcourse and water table. Sandstone also forms a frieze, interrupted by the windows, below the molded tin cornice. At the ends of the facade are wood and glass storefronts, housing two of the hotel's three restaurants, the J-Bar on the west and Library on the east.
Windows on the second story's central projection are one-over-one double-hung sash windows with transoms and sandstone sills and lintels. In the middle two, the words "Hotel" and "Jerome" are carved. They are slightly recessed between brick pilasters with sandstone bases and capitals with decorative carvings. On the flanks, the windows are set in round segmental arches laid with several rows of splayed brick and topped with brick voussoirs. They, too, have sandstone sills, and a sandstone course runs around the building at the arches' springline.
At the third story, the four-pane center windows, also recessed, have a similar round-arched treatment as the flanking second-story windows. On the sides are four one-over-one sash windows with sandstone sills and small decorations between them. At the lintel is a dentilled, fluted wooden frieze that continues around the entire building except the front portico. Above it is a ridged metal convex cornice that marks the roofline. It is topped by a parapet with four rows of recessed square panels. A flagpole is located in the center of the roof at the front.
The east face has a similar, more restrained treatment, with the sandstone trim, stringcourses, cornices, and fenestration. On the west side, there is little decoration other than the segmental splayed-brick arches on the windows. The brick annex on the north side is non-contributing, as it was not part of the original building.
Inside, many original finishes remain. The lobby has been restored to its original appearance. From the lobby, hallways lead to the Garden Terrace restaurant in a western annex, with an adjacent outdoor terrace south of the swimming pool. The first floor is also home to several meeting spaces, including the Grand Ballroom in the northeast corner of the rear block, the only above-ground ballroom in Aspen, with ceilings.
On the upper floors, there are 94 guest rooms. They range from in size, from single rooms to suites. Standard amenities include marble vanities in the bathrooms, high-speed Internet access, a DVD player, a fully stocked mini-bar, and beds with 300-thread-count linens. Their configuration has changed considerably from their original layout.
History The Jerome's history parallels Aspen's. It was opened with grand ambitions in the city's early boom years and survived as Aspen's only hotel during the city's long "quiet years" in the early 20th century, under the ownership of the Elisha family. With the development of skiing after World War II, it began to see a new potential realized only with major renovations at the end of the 20th century that made it the upscale hotel it is today.
1889–1892: Construction and early boom years In the late 1870s, prospectors venturing west from Leadville in search of silver veins crossed the Continental Divide at Independence Pass and continued down the Roaring Fork Valley to establish several mining camps. One of them, at the confluence of the Roaring Fork and Castle Creek, became the area's pre-eminent settlement by 1879. At first it was called Ute City, after the local Native American tribe, but by the early 1880s it had been renamed Aspen, after the trees abundant in the area.
Jerome Wheeler, then a co-owner of Macy's, visited Aspen in 1883 while on vacation in Colorado. He was impressed by the potential he saw and began investing in the community, completing a smelter that had been started earlier so that ore did not have to be taken back to Leadville. After winning a legal battle over the rights to the Smuggler Mine, the richest lode in the area, and leaving Macy's, he commissioned the construction of the hotel and the Wheeler Opera House, both bearing his name, as well as a house in the city's residential West End.
Wheeler meant for the hotel to be the equal of great European hotels such as Claridge's in London and the George-V in Paris. He loaned $60,000 ($ in modern dollars) to another local innkeeper to build the hotel. Costs escalated to more than twice that amount, and a month before the hotel was set to open, the builders left town unexpectedly, leaving Wheeler owing approximately $150,000 ($ in modern dollars). "[He had] discovered the first rule of building in Aspen: it always costs way more than you planned", observed a commentator over a century later.
It was one of the first buildings west of the Mississippi to have full electric lighting. Other amenities included running water, indoor plumbing, steam heat, and an elevator. At the time of its opening, on the night before Thanksgiving, it had 90 rooms (or 76, according to some accounts), which rented for up to $4 ($ in modern dollars) a night. Early guests included Wheeler's business friends from the East, theater stars of the era and wealthy travelers. As its builder had intended, it occupied the most commanding location in the city.Rohrbough, 168.
In 1892, three years after its completion, Wheeler sold the hotel to a Denver man named Archie Fisk for $125,000 ($ in modern dollars) as part of a general liquidation of his Aspen assets after losing a lengthy lawsuit over a mining deal.Smith, Stacey; , Aspen Historical Society, December 1998, retrieved August 22, 2011, p. 39. Page number refers to those used by the reading software and not those in the actual document. The next year, in response to the Panic of 1893, Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, ending the Colorado Silver Boom and with it Aspen's early boom years. Fisk could not pay taxes on the property, and it soon became the property of Pitkin County, and then became Wheeler's again. It remained the center of the city's social life, partially because it had the only public bathroom downtown.
1893–1946: The quiet years Over the next several decades, a period that came to be known later as "the quiet years", the town's population declined from thousands to hundreds. The Jerome remained open, the city's only hotel, often becoming by default a boardinghouse. In 1911, ownership passed to local businessman Mansor Elisha, a Syrian American drummer with a travelling band who had stopped in Aspen, taken a job as the Jerome's bartender, and later acquired the hotel from Wheeler, who had by this time long left the city and was unable to pay the taxes as he had gone bankrupt.
In 1918, the Jerome's parlors served as morgues during the flu epidemic. The next year, Elisha threw a welcome-home dance for local soldiers returning from World War I. Prohibition had started by then, and to survive, the J-Bar became a soda fountain. Liquor service continued, in the form of a popular drink called the Aspen Crud, still served there today, that is essentially a vanilla ice cream soda or milkshake generously spiked with bourbon. Whole families were known to stop by after church and share one.
Mansor Elisha died in 1935, leaving his son Laurence in charge of the hotel. The following year the seeds were planted for the city's recovery when Tom Flynn, a former resident trying to sell some of his mining claims, showed pictures of them to Billy Fiske, a U.S. Olympic bobsledder who had competed at the Winter Olympics earlier that year. He saw perfect terrain for a ski resort and went out to Aspen to buy some land. Over that winter, the newly formed Highland Bavarian ski club built its first ski run near Ashcroft. Its first two guides, Swiss skier André Roch and Austrian mountaineer Gunther Langes, lived in the Jerome for five weeks while the lodge was finished.Lund and Hayes, 15–16.