Full Speed Ahead for Iowa's Wright Hotel
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Feb. 23, 2010
Wright designed this bank, adjacent to the Historic Park Inn in Mason City, Iowa. The bank and inn will become a boutique hotel, scheduled to open in 2011.
Credit: Wright on the Park
Just five years ago, an Iowa hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright was for sale on eBay for $10 million.
After minimal interest, a group of residents of Mason City, Iowa, approached the city council, which owned the Park Inn, with a plan to revive the shuttered 1910 landmark, closed since 1972. And last month the group now officially known as Wright on the Park, Inc., celebrated an official groundbreaking ceremony that marked the beginning of an $18.5 million renovation.
Although the organization had already stabilized the inn and restored its 25 art-glass panels, construction work began in earnest this month on the inn and the adjacent National City Bank, also designed by Wright and completed in 1910. Together, the buildings will be transformed into a boutique hotel.
Wright on the Park, Inc., has been working for five years to raise money for project, which won two grants from Save America's Treasures, a federal program that is now in peril. Fortunately for the group, the funding for the project is in place, and the hotel is scheduled to open next year.
"A quality renovation like Wright on the Park has planned will surely be an attraction for Wright fans from across the nation, a boon to downtown Mason City, and a key community center, as downtown hotels always are," says Royce Yeater, director of the Chicago-based Midwest Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which awarded a grant to Wright on the Park, Inc.
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Comments
Submitted by cbawlf@shaw.ca at: February 26, 2010
THANK YOU - A PRESERVATION FAN IN CANADA
Submitted by minxinPhilly at: February 25, 2010
I'm so glad that another American treasure is being saved! I wish you, "Wright on the Park" all the best and much success. Incidentally one of my uncles did waterproofing work on Wright's Master Work in Pennsylvania several years ago, Falling Water, built for the Kaufman family as a retreat from the hot and humid Pittsburgh summers. I mention this only as an introduction to what everyone already knows about FLW buildings---they all leak like seives so you'll want to work on that roof as soon as possible. Have fun.