Old-Ass Building of the Week-- April 18

Hyatt at the Bellevue(formerly the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue, Hotel Atop the Bellevue, the Fairmont Hotel, and the Bellevue-Stratford)

200 S. Broad St. 

If you saw this building in 1910 you'd shit yourself too! Image from shorpy.com.

                Now here’s some nice shit. Two hotels, the Bellevue and the Stratford, lit up the 100 foot wide dirt and domestic animal shit strewn Broad Street of the 19^th Century. In the best merger until Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage had a tag team, the two hotels combined to build a massive French Renaissance Supercastle in 1904. This wasn’t just any hotel… in 1904 a hotel of this size and elegance makes the seven-star Burj Dubai look like a rundown Days Inn with a country western bar in it.

                Back in the day, the Bellevue-Stratford was the finest-ass hotel you could stay in ANYWHERE. When it opened the normal hotel room had Tiffany fucking glass lamps with bulbs made like 3 days ago by Thomas Edison himself. That would be the same as a modern hotel room with a holodeck and an android hooker.  On top of that, when it was first built, the Bellevue-Stratford was one of the tallest buildings on the Philadelphia skyline… so if you did get the 11-room Royal Suite/Ultimate Five-in-one Mega Sky Fortress, you would be able to confirm your Mastery of the Universe as you looked down upon the sheep being herded along Broad Street. 

                The super-rich trustafarian hipsters of the era made this their Philadelphia homebase. Parties, cotillions, banquets, conferences, grand balls, presidential visits and orgies of the rich and famous went down inside this Parthenon of Pussy Punching. The place was so badass that in 1948 both the Democrats and Republicans had their conventions there.

                      In 1976, as an act of God-Tier Badassery, the Bellevue-Stratford became the origin point to a whole DISEASE. That’s right, this Embattlement of Ball-Bludgeoning is where Legionnaire’s Disease was first spread; infecting 221 and killing 34. How many other awesome buildings have killed people through bacterial infection?

                      Today, the building is functioning as a mixed-use hotel/office/retail powerhouse. The façade is crumbling and hurting people, another example of how this building keeps wanting to take people out.