The Chase Hotel

The Chase Hotel is a broad red brick hotel block in the Italian Renaissance manner, banded and crowned in cream terra cotta. Its upper floors carry an arcade of round-arched windows set in elaborate terra-cotta surrounds — twisted colonnettes, foliate archivolts, and shield-and-medallion spandrels — beneath an arched corbel cornice and a parapet of turned balusters. The ground floor reads as a rusticated arcaded base with round-arched openings and a marquee at the Kingshighway entrance. Behind the street front, an arcaded courtyard loggia repeats the same arches and terra-cotta ornament.

The Chase Hotel opened on September 29, 1922, at 212 North Kingshighway Boulevard in the Central West End, built by the developer Chase Ullman and designed by Preston J. Bradshaw, who drew its arches, courtyard, and ornamental plasterwork from Italian Renaissance sources. The nine-story hotel was built in about nine months. In 1929 Sam Koplar opened the separate Park Plaza Hotel, an Art Deco tower, next door. In 1961 the two were combined into a single operation, the Chase Park Plaza. They are run together today as one hotel — the Royal Sonesta Chase Park Plaza — under a single landmark designation, though they remain two distinct buildings.