The Chicago Beach Hotel was located in the Indian Village neighborhood of the Kenwood community area of Chicago, Illinois, on the property that currently houses Regents Park. The Hotel was built at East Hyde Park Boulevard (51st Street) and Cornell Avenue in 1890. It was one of many speculative hotels built to accommodate the Columbian Exposition of 1893. In 1912 a huge 12 story addition was constructed.
The building extended to Lake Michigan. The building resembled the Hyde Park Hotel and probably shared architects. The building was rebuilt as a 12 story resort. Many Chicagoans of high social standing became residents and members. The building had private access to the beach until 1915 when the city created an adjacent bathhouse. During World War II it was commandeered by the military and served as Gardiner General Hospital. After the war the building served as the 5th Army Headquarters. It was demolished following the war. Now, the Regents Park apartments are located on the property.
A second, unrelated Chicago Beach Hotel, built in 1929, still stands a block away at 5100-5110 South Cornell Avenue. Currently used as an apartment building, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 14, 1986.
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—David Mamet, U.S. screenwriter, and Brian DePalma. Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.”
—William Least Heat Moon [William Trogdon] (b. 1939)