Category:Hotel Traylor

Hotel Traylor, located at 1444 West Hamilton Street in Allentown, was built in 1917 by Samuel Traylor. Traylor kept his office there and also lived there in the later years of his life. In 1945 Traylor retired to his home in Florida and passed away in 1947.

At the hotel's opening on 26 August 1917, Traylor signed the guest book as its first guest. The structure of the building, in the form of three Ls, was praised for its openness to air and light, a concern in its pre-air conditioning era. The second, third and fourth floors were divided into apartments, one of which was Traylor's. A private entrance on the 15th street side gave him access to his apartment. The fifth floor had 41 rooms for hotel guests. The lobby was decorated with expensive carpets, potted palms and Tiffany lighting fixtures. A separate writing room with wicker chairs was located off the lobby in the central wing.

However, it was the sixth floor of the hotel that attracted the most attention. On the east wing was a large dining room, dance floor and social hall. The center wing was occupied by a kitchen and private banquet room with accommodations for 150. The west wing contained a glass-enclosed summer restaurant. Above the restaurant was a roof garden abounding in ferns and palms,, from where visitors could view the city of Allentown.

In 1929, the hotel was expanded with a fourth wing added on the east side of the hotel. Although the wing was designed, as was the rest of the hotel, by Allentown architects Rhue and Lange, it was Traylor himself who supervised the work, as he had with the original construction in 1917. The fourth wing gave the hotel a total of 228 rooms, and about 100 of those were designed as apartments. The front of the hotel lobby was also re-designed into the form of a long corridor that extended the length of the building. To the left was the "Spanish" style lounge. Beyond the hotel office and main desk were the main dining room and coffee shop. It was furnished in the style of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. The sixth floor main banquet room had been remodeled into an ocean liner theme, known as the "S. S. Traylor". Traylor contracted with RCA in New York City to install a radio in every room, which in 1929, was state-of-the-art technology.

The fourth wing was designed to be nine floors, rather than six, which appears on postcards and the design drawings of the hotel at the time. Traylor also planned on building a parking deck, unique for 1929 behind the hotel to replace the open parking lot. However, with the stock market crash of 1929, the fourth wing was limited to six floors and the parking deck was never built due to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In its early to mid-20th-century heyday, the Hotel Traylor was popular with prominent visitors to the city, including ex-president William Howard Taft, conductor and composer John Philip Sousa, baseball great Babe Ruth and movie star Joan Crawford. Traylor's son, William, ran the hotel for many years. In the 1950s, a more modern bar and lounge was added. In 1960, the "Texas Room" was added to the lounge, which steaks, other meats and lobsters were charcoal broiled in front of the guests by a chef. The hotel also made a number of changes in the early 1960s, making commercial office space available for local business organizations, and converting 20 of its rental apartments to permanent leased type. It also developed 18 of what were called CONEX apartments, which were flexible in size, primarily for business executives which would be moving into Allentown and needed temporary housing for their families. It retained 123 nightly guest rooms for travelers along with its dining room and cocktail lounge.

By the late 1960s, however, the hotel was losing money prodigiously due to competition from suburban motels like the George Washington Motor Lodge or Quality Inn. At those facilities, corporations especially planning sales meetings or corporate conferences could use ground-floor banquet rooms to set up various displays and other assets much easier, and the access to road links like the Lehigh Valley Thruway meant not having to navigate large trucks into downtown Allentown. Facilities such as the Hotel Traylor or Americus Hotel meant moving all the equipment and other aspects up elevators, and there was limited parking for visitors in the downtown hotels.

The hotel was in general operation, renting rooms for travelers until January 1968, when the hotel was sold by the William Traylor Estate to the Lehigh Valley Hotel Corporation, which was a group of Allentown businessmen who joined together to purchase the hotel from the Traylor family. The new owners closed features such as the Jade, Sphinx, Sky Terrace Rose and Gold banquet rooms and converted them into office space due to the lack of convention business. Eventually 40,000 square feet had been renovated and leased out for office space. The number of hotel rooms was also reduced from 123 to 60, although the permanent and CONEX apartments were retained. The hotel ended all of its food service and catering business in 1972 when it's coffee shop and restaurants were closed. However the restaurant and lounge in the 1929 annex remained open, although it was operated by a private firm which leased it from the hotel.

The hotel desk was closed in 1977 which subsequently ended its use as a hotel. With the closure of the desk, the former hotel rooms were converted into 20 apartments, 10 efficiencies for long-term leases and 43 single rooms for short-term lease, however the restaurant inside the hotel's annex remained open.

In 1979, the hotel was sold to Harold G Fulmer III, who operated the hotel as a combination office building and apartment complex. The restaurant changed operators over the years as well, but remained open. However, by the 1990s, the hotel began to become run down and became less and less desirable with the Allentown Police responding to calls at the hotel frequently. The commercial office space continued to be leased, however it was also becoming less and less desirable for use by professionals.

The Traylor was again sold in November 2007 to Joe Clark, owner of the "Crocodile Rock" nightclub. Clark began renting out the single rooms with longer than 30-day leases, effectively turning it into a rooming house. Shortly afterward the restaurant, by then known as "Harry's Bar" was ordered shut in December 2007 by a Lehigh County judge due to the large amount of criminal activity taking place in it. The City of Allentown sued Clark, stating that operating it as a rooming house was in violation of the city's zoning laws. Clark subsequently filed for bankruptcy, and the hotel was again taken over by Fulmer in December 2008.

In February 2009, Fulmer again sold the property, this time to David Bodnar and James Baiman, a Philadelphia group who promised to renovate and improve the building. In recent years, the interior of the building has been modernized and the facility has been turned into professional offices, commercial office space and long-term apartments for lease. It remains, however, a frequent location for Allentown Police Department response calls.