Walking Where They Walked: Park Hotel


Park Hotel, Rock Springs, Wyoming, September 2013, RR&B

19 Elk Street, Rock Springs, Sweetwater, Wyoming

The Park Hotel opened in 1914 and was the hub of Western Wyoming until the late 1950’s. It was the largest and most modern hotel in the city. Advertisements boasted of hot and cold water in each of its 38 rooms, twenty of which had private baths and toilets. The fourth floor was added in the 1920’s. The Park Hotel catered to commercial men and automobile tourists traveling the Lincoln Highway. The hotel had a boisterous barroom and a sedate restaurant with sparking white table cloths.

Rock Springs Miner, 30 January 1914, page 1, Wyoming Newspaper Project online.
One memory of the Park Hotel, is related by Thomas P. Cullen, “One summer afternoon while walking up Elk Street toward the C Street Crossing, my attention was drawn to the small crowd assembled near the north end of the Park Hotel. A slight man, of short stature, stood rolling up his pantlegs (sic) preparing to scale the northeast corner of the hotel. Using only the strength in his fingers and the nonskid feature of his well-worn tennis shoes, he inched his way up the corner of the brick building. He proceeded slowly, didn’t falter, and with skill and determination reached the top of the hotel building without using ropes or any other device. His only reward was the applause of the small crowd gathered on the street below.” (Cullen, page 93.)



Sources: 
 “Rock Springs, Historic Downtown Walking Tour”, Rock Springs Historical Board, Norma Jean Robins, 1996.
Rhode, Robert B., “Booms & Busts on Bitter Creek”, Fred Pruett Book, Boulder, Colorado, 1987.
Cullen, Thomas P., “Rock Springs: Growing Up In a Wyoming Town, 1915-1938”, Portland, Oregon, 1985. 
Rock Springs Miner, Wyoming Newspaper Project online:  http://wyonewspapers.org/ 


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