This week 84 years ago just 35 days after the stock market crash of 1929, the 400 room Baker Hotel opened at Mineral Wells in Palo Pinto County, Texas. The fourteen-story Baker Hotel was the first skyscraper built outside a metropolitan area. The hotel was only profitable during wars (there was a military base nearby) and during political conventions held at the hotel.
It was closed in 1972 in another chapter of the relationship between the building of tall skyscrapers and business cycles The Baker Hotel was once a beautiful new playground for the rich and famous. Among those who were once guests of the Baker are Jack Dempsey, Marlene Dietrich, the Dorsey Brothers, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Jean Harlow, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Sammy Kaye, Helen Keller, Dorothy Lamour, Guy Lombardo, Mary Martin, General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, Roy Rogers, Will Rogers, Ronald Reagan, the Three Stooges, and Lawrence Welk. HT: KA
