Events
From its opening, the hotel was a center of the social life of Boston's elite. In 1913, Hamilton Fish, Jr., held a "Lenten dance" where "society leaders ... from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington and Boston greeted the coming of daylight this morning at the Copley Plaza Hotel".
In the 1920s, John Singer Sergeant kept rooms at the hotel and painted portraits there. Sergeant used one of the hotel's employees, a black elevator operator named Thomas McKeller, as the model for Apollo in his decoration of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
In February 1935, civic leaders held a dinner for Babe Ruth at the Copley Plaza to celebrate his return to Boston after 16 years with the New York Yankees.
In 1940 Cincinnati Reds catcher Willard Hershberger committed suicide in his hotel room by slitting his throat.
On March 29, 1979, a disgruntled former employee set multiple fires in both the Copley Plaza and the nearby Sheraton Boston hotels. The fire at the Copley Plaza, which was occupied by 430 people at the time, injured thirty and killed one. Among those injured was media mogul Sumner Redstone, who survived by hanging from a third-story window. His hand was partially paralyzed from the fire. Film director Rob Cohen was also rescued from the fire.
Frederick Kerry, paternal grandfather of U.S. Sen. John Kerry, committed suicide with a gunshot to the head in the restroom of this hotel in 1921.
In the 1930s, the Boston Horse Show awarded the Copley-Plaza Challenge Trophy.
Read more about this topic: The Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”
—Marilyn French (b. 1929)
“The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)