We’re reaching the end of the path today in our “Walk with
the Historian” series spotlighting things you might not know about at West
Baden Springs Hotel. Brush up on the first
and second
installments if you missed them. Resort historian Jeff Lane takes us onward
through the final leg, starting with…
The Barbershop
The light fixtures on the wall and the tile patterns on the
wall and floor are your first clue. The porcelain sink and the barber chair are
a pretty strong hint. And the shoe-shine stand is a dead giveaway.
“This room is the most intact of any room from the original
hotel,” Jeff affirms.
The old barbershop gives you all the feels of stepping back
85 years in time. The echo-y acoustics add to the vintage sensation. The
lowered ceiling does conceal the reinforced steel that was installed more than
20 years ago during the hotel’s restoration phase. But practically everything
else in this room has some sort of historical story to tell.
Back in the hotel’s early era from 1902-1934, there would’ve
been a row of five barber chairs and five sinks along the wall — just one of
each remain today. Even the mirrors on the wall survived after the hotel closed
to guests after The Great Depression. The marble shoe-shine stand looks exactly
today as it would’ve 100 years ago, right down to the little compartments where
the shoe shiners would have stored their brushes and polish and rags.
These days, the barbershop is a mini museum of sorts, with
display cases and other relics from decades gone by. The tombstone under the
sink belongs to Rex, the dog of the Lee Sinclair family that owned the hotel
when it was built. (Fear not, Rex wasn’t buried in the hotel; rather his
tombstone was recovered and brought inside.)
Across the room are a large wooden closet from one of the original rooms, as well as one of the dozens of wooden chairs that used to be sitting out in the atrium for guests to relax in. (The couches and chaise lounges in the atrium today are just a bit of an upgrade in terms of plushness.) Behind the chair, you can see doors that used to open up so guests could walk right in from the atrium.
It’s tantalizing to think how different the hotel once was
when similar shops once used to occupy this lower level ringing the atrium. There
was an aviary where birds were sold. A beauty salon. A haberdashery where hats
were peddled. There was even a movie theater. “Mr. Sinclair was a fan of
Westerns, and even if he was late, the show did not start until he had taken
his seat,” Jeff says.
There were other gift shops here, too, including an Oriental
store. The Logan Bryan stock exchange was in one of these inner shops, because
wealthy guests would want to keep tabs on their stocks.
“This would’ve been a
pretty busy place,” Jeff says.
Pointing the way
You get off the elevator in a hotel and start the hunt for
your room. You’re studying the doors and wall signs. The carpet below your feet
is an afterthought.
But there’s a neat little touch on each of the five
guestroom-level floors at West Baden.
All through the hallways are compasses woven into the carpet
fabric. They’re not strictly decorative. As you walk, you’ll notice the
orientation of each compass shifts just slightly. When you walk in a circle,
you can’t get lost — but it can be disorienting.
“That just tells you your directions no matter where you
are,” Jeff says. “And you don’t have to walk far until you see another one.”
About every 30 feet, in fact. If you do a full loop around
the floor, there’s about 20 compasses in total to point the way, depending on
the floor you’re on. It wasn’t original to the hotel, but just one of the
discreet details that was added in the hotel’s restoration to accent the
building’s unique circular structure.
Do you spot it?
The dome at West Baden is just too obvious to focus on. Everyone’s
eyes are drawn to the dome overhead, and that can dwarf a few of the little
details hiding around the atrium.
For starters:
“A lot of people do not see an image of the hotel under the
tree,” Jeff says, referencing the Rookwood fireplace in the atrium. “A lot of
people look at that and never see a hotel.”
Do you spot it?
It’s tucked under the first main limb that branches to the
right of the main trunk. Up close, it’s more distinguishable.
The rest of the fireplace scene depicts “Sprudel,” the
gnome-ish West Baden mascot, overlooking the mineral springs of this area. And the
tree is believed to be one that’s more synonymous with Ohio than Indiana: the
buckeye tree. The Rookwood company — which crafted the fireplace from several
hundred ceramic pottery pieces — is based in Cincinnati, so the buckeye
connection makes sense.
And while logs no longer burn in the fireplace, back in the
day when it did, the smoke took a detour to escape the building. There’s
guestrooms right above the fireplace, so the chimney took a detour up, to the
left, and up the column and out the building. If you look at the photo closely,
the reddish area that you can see outside of the dome that extends up from that
column is where the escape vent was.
And finally, one eagle-eyed observation that Jeff caught is
hidden in the decorative pattern next to a guestroom a few floors above
Ballard’s in the Atrium. It’s a single, lone white vine that stands alone amid
the red vine pattern across the rest of the atrium.
What’s the significance? Hard to tell. Could be nothing more
than an oversight; or it could contain some type of symbolism that a historic
restoration is never really finished.