Peabody Hotel - History

History

The original Peabody Hotel was built by Robert Campbell Brinkley in 1869, who named it after the recently deceased George Peabody out of respect for his contributions to the South. Located at the corner of Main and Monroe streets, the hotel was highly successful. Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, lived there in 1870 when he worked in Memphis as president of an insurance company. It closed in 1923.

The current Peabody Hotel building, on Union Avenue, was built in 1925 on the previous site of the Fransioli Hotel, which looked just like the original Peabody Hotel. Designed by Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager, the Italian Renaissance building holds historical and cultural significance; it has been said that the Mississippi Delta "begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel (in Memphis) and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg".

Before the mid-1960s, alcoholic beverages were sold in Tennessee only as sealed bottles in licensed liquor stores. The Hotel Peabody had a bar, The Creel, for its patrons on those days. Patrons would bring a bottle, acquired elsewhere, into The Creel, and the bartender would tag the bottle for later retrieval. The bartender would then mix drinks from the patron's bottle on request.

The hotel went bankrupt in 1965 and was sold in a foreclosure auction to Sheraton Hotels. It became the Sheraton-Peabody Hotel.

The Sheraton-Peabody closed in 1973, generally an era of urban blight for many American cities. Isadore Edwin Hanover purchased the hotel from the county in 1975 for $400,000 and sold it to his son-in-law, Jack A. Belz, for the same amount. Belz spent the next several years and $25,000,000 renovating the landmark structure. The grand reopening in 1981 is widely considered in Memphis as a major stimulus and inspiration for the downtown revitalization that followed and still continues.

The Peabody Hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.