An eleven-story downtown hotel of red brick on a corner site at Sixth Street, its long walls gridded with regularly spaced windows above a stone-faced two-story base of shopfronts and a marquee. A hipped tile roof and modillioned cornice capped the block, and rooftop steel sign frames spelled HOTEL YORK on two sides. A canopy marked the corner entrance on Sixth Street. Next door on the side street stood the Grand Theatre, its vertical sign and marquee visible; across the way lay the Jordan-Scheid Company warehouse and a landscaped triangular plaza.
The York Hotel stood downtown at 6 South Sixth Street, one of the many mid-sized commercial hotels that served the blocks around Sixth and Market Streets in the first half of the twentieth century. An eleven-story brick building crowned with an illuminated HOTEL YORK roof sign, it shared its block with the Grand Theatre next door. The Sievers Studio photographed the hotel in August 1948, and it was still in business into the 1950s, when it appeared on souvenir postcards of the city. Like most of its neighbors on this stretch of Sixth Street, the York did not survive the postwar remaking of downtown, as blocks near Market Street were cleared for parking, new construction, and the Gateway Mall. Its architect and the years of its building and demolition are not established in readily available sources; the hotel is documented here chiefly through photographs and postcards of its final decades.
