Just the pictures from my camera phone. I have many more to come.
This was the view from our balcony on the 6th floor of the West Baden Springs Hotel in French Lick, Indiana.
Yes, those are people down there and it's NOT doll furniture. It's HUGE and was the biggest domed building in the world until the Astrodome was built in Huston. They called it "The 8th Wonder of the World" for many years.
This is the domed roof at the West Baden. It's VERY unique.
West Baden in this form was designed in 1902 by a 35 year old architect, Harrison Albright of West Virginia... the only architect who would tackle the job. The arches are on rollers to move with the shifting of the building due to weather changes. It is EXTREMELY STRONG. The young architect stood on the top of the dome as the building supports were removed. Lee W. Sinclair, the man who owned the hotel and had the original idea would not stand on the dome. He said "I'm rich, but I'm not stupid."
This is a section of the outside walls of some of the rooms at West Baden. It also shows a bit of the artwork on the walls and the dome.
You can see that we were not the only people out on the balconies. The gold color on the pillars is gold leaf. The designs are all hand painted on canvas. The Roman (Greek?) goddesses are hand painted as are the patterns on the bottom of the dome. All of this has been recently restored and has only been re-opened for less than a year. The hotel was in TERRIBLE shape, to the point of a whole wall falling down and water leakage everywhere. A wealthy philanthropist and his wife named Bill and Gayle Cook have contributed more than 40 million dollars to restore the hotel to it's former glory... and believe me that they got it beautifully done!
This is looking the other direction from our balcony on the top floor.
The attention to getting all of the details back to the original is phenomenal as most everything was painted over, damaged, removed, or destroyed by vandals. When the Cooks were asked what the budget would be they said, "Whatever it takes."
The long hard history of the resort is incredible.
Just a little higher view showing the artwork around the base of the dome.
The young architect went on to design many more buildings, some in San Francisco that were to withstand earthquakes. Many of them are still standing.
The designs that are all around the huge dome are hand painted on canvas that was applied to the walls.
The hotel has had many owners... including doctors, "pretend doctors", the daughter of one wealthy owner, a circus owner, Jesuits, a Culinary University, the Indiana Historical Society, and now the Cooks. It started off as a big *normal looking* building that burned down and a Sulfur Springs Spa Resort. Mr. Sinclair rebuilt the hotel in it's present form. His daughter enhanced the building but then went bankrupt. Gambling and alcohol use was common here during the prohibition due to the *turning a blind eye* by the then political parties in Indiana. There were MANY, MANY famous (and infamous) people who came to the hotel to use the spring water and to gamble and drink. The story takes a whole book to explain. At one time 14 trainloads of tourists arrived per day, many from Chicago and all over the USA and the world.
Here is Robert enjoying a rocker on the huge veranda. The veranda was added by Mr. Sinclair's daughter in 1913.
The veranda has a little window that opens to a nice ice cream parlor and coffee shop so that you may purchase refreshments while relaxing in the rockers and enjoying the beautiful view of the gardens and wildlife. There are so MANY deer around that Old English Boxwoods had to be planted to keep them from eating all of the flowers. We saw one deer standing on the lawn by the road as we were being transported by on of the shuttles that run between this hotel and another, equally famous hotel a mile away. (The French Lick Springs Resort Hotel and Casino)
These chaise lounge chairs were SO comfortable and held two people at once. I was sitting on one when I took the picture. :-)
The design is meant to simulate resort spas in Greece and Rome. Ms. Sinclair created that design. Her father had made it look like a jungle complete with animals and birds that flew free in the atrium. There was a "Seal Fountain" inside the atrium which she had moved outdoors.
Here is a view of the *riverboat* casino at French Lick Springs Resort from the parking lot of the train museum.
It's NOT a riverboat but a building that looks like one and is "floating" on two feet of water. It took MANY years for French Lick to get a license to have a riverboat casino. (The economy had become terrible in that area.) The renovations (Mr. Cook financed BOTH hotels which are Indiana historic landmark buildings now) and opening of the casino has created jobs for over 10,000 local people.
This is one of the train cars that shipped *Pluto Water* all over the country. There was a bottling plant in French Lick (the plant is now defunct)
It was incredible that people believed (thanks to the *doctors*) that a drink of the sulfur spring water would cure any ailments that they had. What the water actually did was... give them "the runs", therefore "cleansing" them. The *doctor* entrepreneurs even made them believe that there were different kinds of water to cure different ills (including depression!). At the springs themselves there were wooden handled dippers with crystal bowls from which to drink the water. (ick!) Everyone used the same dippers... no washing was done on the crystal bowls.
Even the professional baseball teams came here for spring training and the "cleansing" which would supposedly help them to get back in shape.