The Noel Hotel
The Noel Hotel at 200 N. 4th Ave was built by John and Oscar Noel. The 12-story, 250-room hotel was designed in an Art Deco style. The luxury hotel opened on January 6, 1930. It was the location of many events over the years. It closed September 30, 1972 after the building was purchased by the Hamilton Bank, which renovated the building for bank operations and offices.
It was a gorgeous hotel that even had a built-in wall radio, each with a handful of preset radio stations in guests’ rooms. One outstanding memory I have of staying in that hotel is that of the song “Love Letters in the Sand” by Pat Boone playing on the modern entertainment system.
Currently that location is the NEW Noelle Hotel, a combination of both this and past eras of it.
The Maxwell House Hotel
The Maxwell House Hotel was a major hotel in downtown Nashville at which was built by Colonel John Overton Jr. and named for his wife, Harriet Maxwell Overton. It is said that seven US Presidents and other prominent guests stayed there.
Construction began in 1859 using slave labor. The war caused a suspension of construction on the hotel and the unfinished building was used by the occupying Union Army after 1862 as a barracks, prison, and hospital.
What locals called “Overton’s Folly” was finally completed and opened in fall 1869; total costs were $500,000. The Maxwell House was Nashville’s largest hotel, with five stories and 240 rooms. It advertised steam heat, gas lighting, and a bath on every floor. Rooms cost $4 a day, including meals.
Located on the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue North and Church Street, the hotel had its front entrance, flanked by eight Corinthian columns, on Fourth Avenue in the “Men’s Quarter”. There was a separate entrance for women on Church Street. The main lobby featured mahogany cabinetry, brass fixtures, gilded mirrors, and chandeliers. There were ladies’ and men’s parlors, billiard rooms, barrooms, shaving “saloons,” and a grand staircase to the large ball or dining room.
The hotel was at its height from the 1890s to the early twentieth century. Its Christmas dinner featuring calf’s head, black bear, and opossum, and other unusual delicacies became famous. Hotel guests included William Jennings Bryan, Enrico Caruso, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Annie Oakley, William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), Cornelius Vanderbilt, George Westinghouse, and Presidents Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.
A reported comment by President Theodore Roosevelt that a cup of coffee he drank was “good to the last drop” was used as the advertising slogan for Maxwell House coffee, which was served at and named after the hotel.
After being used for some years as a residential hotel, the Maxwell House Hotel was destroyed by fire on Christmas Night 1961, close to the time that Don Martin moved to Nashville. A newer hotel has been named for the old Maxwell House, the Millennium Maxwell House Hotel. The SunTrust Building was built on the site of the original hotel at 201 4th Avenue North.
The L & C Tower
The Life & Casualty Tower (also known as the L & C Tower) is a skyscraper located at 401 Church Street. It stands 409 feet tall, and has 30 floors. It was designed by prolific Nashville architect, Edwin A. Keeble, finished in 1957. It was Nashville’s first skyscraper and the tallest in Tennessee until 1965, when 100 North Main Street in Memphis surpassed it.
Exterior materials are granite and limestone, with bright green glass windows. The architectural curves and angles at the building’s base focus attention on the entrance, which actually does angle out to the corner of Church Street and 4th Ave.
In the building’s early days, the L&C sign at its apex functioned as a weather beacon, changing color and direction of motion to indicate the weather changes and forecast. The observation deck also housed the studio of WLAC-FM, whose format at the time was “chicken rock,” popular hit music done in instrumental style as if for elevators. It used to be the only element in the Nashville skyline for many years, protruding as though Nashville were giving a mighty finger to the rest of the state.
The Stahlman Building
This building was constructed by Major Edward Bushrod Stahlman. When it opened in 1907, it housed the Fourth National Bank, its original vault still in the basement. It remained in the Stahlman family until the 1950s.
Now well over 100 years old, the building has been renovated into apartments and retail space. Since 1967, its roof has featured large neon letters spelling the callsign of radio station WKDF (and before that, its predecessor, WKDA-FM 103.3 and sister station WKDA-AM 1240), both of which occupied the top floor of the building until moving to its new facilities in 1978.
The building was designed by architect James Edwin Ruthven Carpenter, Jr. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing property to the Nashville Financial Historic District since March 20, 2002. And yes, if you look really close, that is me on the roof of the Stahlman Building catching some rays during a deep album cut by Iron Butterfly I was playing on air.
Others
In the next few weeks we will be trying to deal with some of these other points of interest, including, but not limited to the following:
Fred Harvey’s/St Cloud Corner, Cain Sloan Bldg, Bennie-Dillon Bldg, Library, Union Station, Post Office, Ryman Auditorium, Municipal Auditorium, Hume-Fogg, Printer’s Alley, Glendale Amusement Park, The Arcade and many others in and away from the downtown area.
