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1881 – 1899
The European and the Bristol. At 122–124 South Main Street, Dr. Robert Harris and Edward M. Irvin erected a hotel in 1880, opened in 1881 by L. H. Packard as the European Hotel. In 1883 Mrs. Anna R. Smith became its proprietress — another woman keeping one of the city's hotels in her own name — and renamed it the Hotel Bristol. The Bristol's hotel life was short: it closed as a hotel about 1885, and the building passed to the YMCA as its hall. Four years of lodging under two names is the whole of its record, printed whole.
The Grand View. Christopher Muessel — the brewer whose name runs through the city's German record — built the Grand View Hotel at the northeast corner of St. Joseph Street and Vistula Avenue in 1892–93, a substantial four-story brick. John Ober opened it on 11 August 1893. Byron L. McElrath was among its successors, in 1896, and T. M. Morrison, in 1899, renamed it for himself: the Morrison. By 1907 it traded as the Avenue Hotel. The building remained in the Muessel heirs' ownership through Leeper's account — a brewery fortune's lodging house, kept in the family that built it.
The depot house. Beside the Grand Trunk passenger station, on its north side, Johnson & May built a hotel in 1895, badly damaged before it was even finished by the burning of Shank's livery barn next door. As the Hotel Johnson it passed to Charles L. Goetz and Louis Benz, who leased it on 1 June 1896 to Alexander Curtis; in its later course it traded as the Lafayette Hotel — the second house of that name in this record, the first being the Lafayette Avenue stand of 1865, and the distinction is printed here because the directories do not always make it. A depot hotel lived on the timetable, and this one's documented course in the record reached is its building, its fire, and its first lease.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.