Building West Baden Springs Hotel Today: What Would It Cost?

It blows the mind to think what a relative bargain West Baden Springs Hotel was when it was constructed in 1901-02.

The original contract was for exactly $414,000. That’s all it took to build what everyone back then was calling the “Eighth Wonder of the World” after it opened. In today’s dollars, it’s equivalent to about $12 million.

Not exactly chump change. But, again, a relative bargain when you think about how much it’d cost to build that structure today. So, exactly how much would you be shelling out to build West Baden Springs Hotel in 2020?

“A whole lot,” George Ridgway says with a laugh. He would know. Ridgway was the project architect during the restoration and renovation of the hotel, and he’s got plenty of interesting perspective about the finances and logistics of building West Baden then vs. now.

“The original contract was $414,000 with Caldwell & Drake. We spent $97 million restoring it into a working hotel. At 397,500 square feet,” he says with a pause to calculate some mental math, “it’d be over $100 million today, if I had to start in a green field. And if I had to put it back to the level of a 5-star resort with all the trim and elegance that’s in there, that’d probably be closer to $150 million.”

An original West Baden guest room, looking out
into the atrium.

Ridgway emphasizes the original $414,500 price tag was for a base model West Baden, if you will. The atrium, while impressive in scope with the dome overhead, was otherwise fairly plain. The elegant interior design wasn’t added until 1917. Guest rooms were similarly pedestrian. The outer veranda also didn’t come along until later.

But actually building the hotel in the time they accomplished it 118 years ago? That’s something that might not be replicated today.

Back in 1901, after he lost his original West Baden Springs Hotel to a devastating fire, hotel owner Lee Sinclair vowed to have a bigger, better hotel opened within a year and stopped at nothing to make it happen. His workforce was massive and nonstop. 500 men, working practically round the clock. Incredibly, they had the new West Baden Springs Hotel finished in about 11 months’ time.

Today?

“You probably could do it in 18 months. If you used a method of const called fast track, to where all the designed drawings weren’t done, but enough of them were done that you could get started with the foundations and the structure,” Ridgway says. “The room finish schedule and (interior design), I’m still working on that as the foundations are being built. Of course you don’t have the full set of plans when you start. To design, bid and build (today), I think it’d take about two years.”

This series of photos show the rapid pace of West Baden's construction. The photo above was taken November 27, 1901. Below left is from December 31. In the next photo from April of 1902, the main structure is up and construction of the dome is underway.

And as Ridgway pointed out, to get that hotel built in a year, you needed a minimal amount of changes to the original plans. That’s where Sinclair and his urgent timeline were critical.

“That’s one thing there is a good record of: When people wanted to make changes as it was being built, Lee Sinclair emphatically said, ‘No. We follow this plan.’ That was one of the things that helped expedite construction.”

Believe it or not, one thing that would’ve been easier 118 years ago is the logistics of getting construction materials to the project site.

For example, back then, brick companies had larger inventories than they do now — 20 to 30 acres of it, piled high. The 7.5 million bricks required to build West Baden in 1901-02 were loaded into a railroad car and shipped here with relative ease.

“Whereas today, for that big an order, it might be a year out before they would even get that order fulfilled,” Ridgway says. “This kind of a project, we’d have to know these quantities way in advance so you’d meet whatever timeline that you wanted to open the facility. That’s the big difference between 1902 and 2020.”

They didn’t have everything mapped out perfectly in 1901-02, though. Because much of the concrete was poured in wintertime, they accelerated the mix by adding charcoal. A major no-no in modern construction. A few million of that $97 million in renovation was for reinforced steel that stabilized the building.

Still, Ridgway thinks of the original 1901-02 construction as an orchestra — the masons, iron workers, mosaic tile workers, painters and everyone else — all harmonizing swiftly and perfectly, to finish the building as it went up. “That’s kind of the thing that impresses me the most,” he says.

“There’s historical pics showing the steel trusses that make the atrium, the dome, there were two set on a certain day in April of 1902. And then 13 days later, all of the steel that makes that domed atrium possible, it was all in place in 13 days — without the use of stiff-leg derrick like we’d have today, without the use of 250-foot cranes. The way it was put together in such a hurry, and done so well, is pretty amazing.”

Just another reason why there’s so much awe and wonder underneath that dome.