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Hotel Jerome

Aspen, Colorado, United States · Auberge Resorts · Grand Luxury

Hotel Jerome: ExteriorHotel Jerome: J-Bar sign mounted beside a window with greenery reflected in the glass.Hotel Jerome: Bedroom

Macy's co-owner Jerome B. Wheeler opened this Victorian brick landmark in 1889 wanting an Aspen hotel to rival Claridge's, and it was among the first buildings west of the Mississippi with full electric lighting. It stayed open as the town's only hotel through the quiet years after the silver crash. The J-Bar invented the Aspen Crud under Prohibition, Tenth Mountain Division skiers adopted it, and Hunter S. Thompson treated the bar as his office until his memorial filled the ballroom.

About Hotel Jerome

History

Jerome B. Wheeler arrived in Aspen in 1883 while vacationing in Colorado, found himself captivated by the silver-mining boomtown the Roaring Fork Valley had produced, and committed himself to its future with the thoroughness of a man accustomed to large investments. Wheeler was at the time co-owner of R.H. Macy and Company, and he brought to Aspen the same conviction about the relationship between refined commercial infrastructure and civic ambition that had built Macy's into a New York institution. He invested in mining claims, commissioned the Wheeler Opera House, and in 1888 began planning a hotel that would give the mining camp a standard of accommodation equal to the great European hotels he admired — Claridge's in London, the George V in Paris.

The Hotel Jerome was designed by architect George W. Myers of Detroit and completed in 1889, opening on the evening before Thanksgiving with guests who had traveled from as far as Paris for the occasion. It was one of the first buildings west of the Mississippi River to offer full electric lighting, and its amenities — running water, indoor plumbing, steam heat, an elevator, and 90 guest rooms — were unprecedented for a mountain town. The red brick exterior, trimmed in peachblow sandstone quarried fifty miles away in the Frying Pan River Valley, presented a three-story facade of unmistakable urban ambition on Main Street at Mill Street, the commanding intersection of a city that briefly threatened to become one of the great metropolises of the American West.

The collapse of silver prices following the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893 ended Aspen's boom years and began what later generations called the quiet years — decades when the town's population drained from thousands to hundreds and the Jerome remained open as the city's only hotel, often functioning as a boardinghouse. Ownership passed to Mansor Elisha, a Syrian American drummer who had stopped in Aspen on a touring band's circuit and never left, acquiring the hotel from a bankrupt Wheeler around 1911. The Elishas ran the Jerome as a family business through the Depression and the war, preserving the building when Aspen's other Victorian structures were falling to decay and neglect.

Walter Paepcke, the Chicago industrialist who saw in Aspen the makings of a cultural and intellectual resort, leased the Jerome in the mid-1940s and commissioned the Austrian Bauhaus architect Herbert Bayer to renovate it, an intervention that unfortunately painted over the original brick in grey. The hotel became the social center of the early Aspen Institute and ski resort era, its poolside and lobby hosting Gary Cooper, Lana Turner, John Wayne, and the intellectual circle Paepcke assembled for the Aspen Ideas Festival's predecessor programs.

A 1985 restoration by a group of investors led by local developer Dick Butera spent more than four times the purchase price stripping the Bayer paint to reveal the original brick, restoring all the Victorian interior finishes, and returning the Jerome to something like its 1889 appearance. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. Auberge Resorts took over management in 2012 and undertook a further forty-million-dollar restoration — later supplemented by work on the adjacent Aspen Times Building, converted into the Bad Harriet speakeasy and additional suites — that the architectural firm Rowland + Broughton led. The J-Bar, serving the celebrated Aspen Crud cocktail since Prohibition, and the Prospect restaurant continue as the hotel's social anchors. Hunter S. Thompson used the Jerome as his de facto office for years; Johnny Depp held Thompson's memorial service here in 2005. The building that Jerome Wheeler built to rival the Ritz is still the crown jewel of Aspen's Main Street, and still the most historically layered address in the American mountain West.

The setting

Hotel Jerome anchors the corner of Main Street and Mill Street in Aspen's historic downtown, a Victorian brick landmark built in 1889 by Jerome B. Wheeler — Aspen's foremost silver-era patron. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it was among the first buildings west of the Mississippi with full electric lighting, and remained open through every boom-and-bust cycle that shaped this mining camp into a world-renowned resort. The John Denver Sanctuary is five minutes on foot, the Aspen Art Museum eight, and the Silver Queen Gondola ten, placing ski terrain, cultural institutions, and the storied J-Bar all within a walkable radius of Aspen's most historic address.

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