The Oliver Hotel

Opened December 1898 or December 1899 — the record gives both, printed below · Demolished 1967

Lead: The Oliver Hotel rose on the northwest corner of Main and Washington — the ground of the first St. Joseph, the Derbin, the National, and the Oliver House before it — built and furnished by James Oliver, the chilled-plow maker, as the city's first house in the modern sense. It was a six-story building, steel-framed with hollow tile arches and partitions in the fireproof manner of its decade, 165 feet on Washington Street by 135 feet on Main. The rotunda was its showpiece: allegorical frescoes of the seasons, the arts, and the elements looked down on the lobby, and James Oliver's massive gold loving cup was kept there — the plow fortune's trophy displayed in the plow fortune's hotel. Howard, quoting the house's own literature in South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It, calls it a Renaissance design; Notre Dame's Building South Bend account calls it the most beautifully decorated building west of New York. Its amenities in the trade accounts ran to butlers, a bakery, an in-house barbershop, a drug store with a soda fountain, and a fleet of Western Union deliverymen.

Two facts about the house that everything else agrees on are nonetheless carried by the record in two forms each, and both forms are printed. The cost: six hundred thousand dollars in the National Park Service's Copshaholm documentation, Notre Dame's account, and the house's modern summaries — and seven hundred and fifty thousand in another account carried in this record's Wealth file. Neither figure is an average of anything; the six hundred thousand is the builders'-record figure and the seven hundred and fifty thousand stands as the variant, and both stand here. The opening: Howard's history, written within the decade and resting on the house generation's own account, dates the dedication by public reception to the evening of 20 December 1898, with the formal opening for business the following day. The History Museum's Lost Landmarks account dates the opening 21 December 1899, Notre Dame's Building South Bend places the construction in 1899, and the Louis Grell studio record — the muralist's own file, told below — gives 20 December 1899. A clean year stands between the two datings and no source reached settles it; the file prints Howard's 1898 and the museum's 1899 side by side, and the discrepancy is flagged for the assembly of this record, whose Architecture account carries 1899.

The house's most consequential documented night belongs to the color line and is told in full in that entry below: in the first years of the century — the University of Michigan's published account of Branch Rickey's own telling dates it 1901 — the desk of the Oliver Hotel refused a room to Charles Thomas, the Black catcher of the visiting Wesleyan baseball team, and Rickey's negotiation at that desk became a fixed point in the story Rickey later told of his road to signing Jackie Robinson. The house's later course is management history: the Albert Pick Company took over its management in 1938 and bought the property outright in 1942 — the Grell studio record again — commissioning the artist Louis Grell to paint six lunette murals for the lower rotunda; as the Pick-Oliver it traded into the postwar decades. The end came in 1967: the Oliver Hotel was demolished, per the National Park Service's additional documentation for the Oliver House and the History Museum's account, to clear its corner for the bank tower told in the tower entry below. The corner has carried a tower since; it has not carried the city's first house since 1967.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), quoting South Bend and the Men Who Have Made It (the building, the rotunda, the dedication of 20 December 1898).
2. The History Museum, South Bend — Lost Landmarks account (opened 21 December 1899; the Pick-Oliver; demolition 1967).
3. National Park Service, Joseph D. Oliver House (Copshaholm) additional documentation (cost $600,000; demolished 1967).
4. Building South Bend, University of Notre Dame (construction 1899; $600,000; steel skeleton and hollow tile).
5. Louis Grell studio record (opened 20 December 1899; Albert Pick management 1938, purchase 1942; the six lunette murals).
6. University of Michigan News Service, "Branch Rickey: A Matter of Fairness" (2013), carried by The Clio (the Thomas refusal).
7. The Wealth account in this record (the $750,000 cost variant).