The Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel - Construction and Opening

Construction and Opening

The Copley Plaza was built on the original site of the Museum of Fine Arts and named in honor of John Singleton Copley, an American painter. The total cost was $5.5 million.

The hotel's architect was Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, who also designed other hotels, including the Willard Hotel in Washington D.C. and the Plaza Hotel in New York City, the Copley Plaza's sister hotel. The seven-floor hotel is constructed of limestone and buff brick in the Beaux-Arts style. The E-shaped building is supported by pilings driven to a depth of 70 feet (21 m) below the street level.

When it opened in 1912, the Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald presided over a reception of over a thousand guests. Rooms had been booked as early as 16 months in advance. It first manager, who also lived at the hotel, served for 22 years and he and the hotel were so prominent as to merit an obituary in the New York Times. It became for some years the site of the annual Harvard-Yale dance and other post-football dances, denounced by the authorities of local women's colleges who forbade their students from attending: "These dances have nothing to do with the colleges in question, but have merely a financial interest in them. There is not doubt that they are of an extremely questionable nature owing to the fact that they are entirely opened to the public."

The hotel marked it centennial with another ribbon cutting ceremony by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino on August 16, 2012.