Closing
The Butler closed September 5, 1933. Its contents were auctioned January 15, 1934. All but the bottom two floors were then razed, and a multi-story parking lot erected where the hotel had stood. Not everyone mourned: The Argus wrote "As a matter of fact the Butler was never a hotel to be especially proud of, although for years the food was considered the best in the city. It was constructed for an office building and later converted into a hotel. It was always a firetrap, and it is a very good thing that it is going the way it is instead of the way it might have gone." Eventually the garage came to be owned by Sam Israel and, after his death, the Samis Foundation. The parking garage underwent a major expansion in 2000.
Read more about this topic: Butler Hotel
Famous quotes containing the word closing:
“It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Although sleep pressed upon my closing eyelids, and the moon, on her horses, blushed in the middle of the sky, nevertheless I could not leave off watching your play; there was too much fire in your two voices.”
—Propertius Sextus (c. 50–16 B.C.)
“At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.”
—Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)