The Imperial Hotel is an eight-story early 20th-century hotel designed
in a variation of the Chicago style. It is one of the remaining
tall buildings in Atlanta built in the Chicago style during the
city's first era of skyscraper construction. This style features
a tall, narrow profile, a tripartite exterior design, an internal
skeletal frame supporting exterior veneer walls and elevators. This
hotel is especially noted for its extensive bay windows, a relatively
rare sight in Atlanta. It is one of the few surviving modestly-priced
hotels of this era that catered to the businessmen and tourists
who flocked to the rapidly growing city and formed the mainstay
of its hotel business. In addition, the Imperial Hotel played an
important role in the commercial development northward along Peachtree
Street.
Imperial Hotel entrance
NPS photograph by Jody Cook |
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The rectangular, flat-roofed hotel has a reinforced concrete frame
faced with red brick veneer inset with terra cotta. Its front facade
has a tall, narrow silhouette, subdivided into a tripartite arrangement
of a projecting first floor, a plainly detailed shaft and a more
ornate cap. Between the pairs of double hung sash windows, vertical
pier-like sections rise uninterrupted from the second to the seventh
floor where a string course marks the start of the cap. Both sides
of the building are articulated with seven rows of bay windows which
extend as continuous projections from the second to the eighth floors,
alternating with rows of small sash windows. The projecting first
floor, providing a nondescript entrance to the hotel, was built
in 1953 to replace the original open brick arcade with Tudor arches.
On the interior, the hotel has public areas on both the first floor
and in the basement with hotel rooms above. The first floor contained
a lobby and a lounge area which was extensively remodeled following
a 1968 fire. Some historic features in the lobby included a Tudor-arched
stone fireplace, marble wainscoting, crown molding around the exposed
concrete ceiling beams and a fan-light above the opening to the
lounge area. Two historic Otis elevators with all their original
equipment and a stairwell rise through the building. The upper floor
rooms are organized off both sides of a T-shaped central corridor.
The hotel was vacated in the early 1980s, and stood empty until
a rehabilitation effort in 1996 restored the building into a low-income
housing project.
The Imperial Hotel, 355 Peachtree St., now contains 120 apartments.
It is not open to the public.
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