Drake Hotel (Chicago) - Urban Legends

Urban Legends

According to local legend, John Drake (1826-1895) (the father of this hotel's founders) was standing with a hotel owner watching the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The owner seeing his hotel threatened by the flames offered to sell it for any price. Drake noticed that the wind direction was changing and made an offer and so founded the Drake Hotel. This urban legend cannot be true because it occurs 49 years before the hotel's founding. The story is probably confused with the interim New Tremont House purchase by John Drake, at the time of the Great Fire.

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