Chase Park Plaza Hotel

• 1. Introduction

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  The Royal Sonesta Chase Park Plaza St. Louis sits at 212 N. Kingshighway Boulevard in the Central West End, a hotel so intertwined with the city's history that its name changed at least four times before settling into its current form. Two towers face each other at the corner of a St. Louis boulevard, built seven years apart by men who started as rivals and ended up bound together by bankruptcy, friendship, and a remarkable act of religious charity. What drove those two buildings to merge? And what happened when a baseball legend walked through the front door and changed who was allowed inside?

• 2. Chase and the Park Plaza

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  The Chase Hotel opened on the 29th of September, 1922, built by developer Chase Ullman. From its first day it displaced the nearby Buckingham Hotel as the most luxurious address in St. Louis. Eleven years later, in 1933, the ground-floor Chase Club began booking nationally known entertainers, a run that lasted until the club closed in 1972.

  The Park Plaza Hotel opened next door in 1929, conceived specifically as a rival to the Chase. Its original owner, Sam Koplar, watched his investment collapse when the Great Depression wiped out his finances, and a foreclosure notice cost him the building. Rather than walk away from St. Louis hospitality, Koplar took a job next door, managing the very hotel he had been competing against. Through the help of a rabbi friend, he raised enough funds to buy the Park Plaza back from the insurance company in 1944. Two years after that, in 1946, Koplar became the Chase's majority owner as well.

• 3. Merger and Decline

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  In 1961 the Koplar family formally merged the two properties under the name The Chase-Park Plaza, hyphenating what had once been a rivalry into a single brand. Twenty years later, in 1981, the family sold to a group of investors called Chase Hotel Redevelopment Corporation. That group defaulted on its loan, and their lender, GE Capital, seized the 1,700-room hotel in 1983.

  GE moved quickly to reshape what it held. In 1985 the company closed the hotel rooms in the Park Plaza tower and spent $12 million converting the building into apartments, which opened in 1988. Business in the remaining Chase wing kept declining, and GE closed those hotel rooms in 1989. The building's contents were auctioned off in 1991, and the Chase wing sat vacant for nearly a decade.

  Developer Jim Smith purchased the property in 1997 and poured $125 million into a renovation. The hotel reopened in 1999 under the name The Chase Park Plaza, dropping the hyphen the Koplars had given it in 1961.

• 4. Changing Hands

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  In 2006 the property sold to Behringer Harvard for $180 million. The next sale, in June 2017, went to Boston-based Hospitality Properties Trust for $94 million, with $60 million of that sum used specifically to retire the hotel's existing debts. Hospitality Properties Trust had already lined up Sonesta Hotels to manage the building before the sale closed, and on the 18th of May, 2017, the property was renamed The Royal Sonesta Chase Park Plaza St. Louis.

  The complex today holds two buildings, a cinema, several restaurants and bars, and the former Park Plaza tower operating as condominiums. The Chase Park Plaza is also part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Historic Hotels of America program, a designation that places it in the company of other properties recognized for architectural and cultural significance.

• 5. Jackie Robinson's Challenge

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  Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color line on the 15th of April, 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base, making him the first African American to play in the major leagues in the modern era. He had been a second baseman by trade, but that opening-day assignment at first base would become one of the defining images of the integration of American sport.

  By 1953, Robinson was openly criticizing the segregated hotels and restaurants that served the Dodger organization on the road. His public challenge produced results. A number of those establishments integrated in response, and the Chase Hotel was among them. That shift at the Chase was not an isolated act of goodwill but part of a broader pressure campaign by a man who understood that his visibility gave him leverage over institutions that preferred to ignore the question.

• 6. Wrestling at the Chase

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  Sam Koplar's son Harold ran KPLR-TV channel 11, a television operation whose offices were housed in the hotel and the adjoining Park Plaza apartments. From 1959 to 1983 that proximity produced one of St. Louis's most distinctive cultural exports: a wrestling program called Wrestling at the Chase.

  The show drew names from across professional wrestling's landscape. St. Louis native Lou Thesz appeared on the program, as did Buddy Rogers. The Chase's ballrooms and television studios had once hosted the Chase Club's musical entertainment; now they were home to a different kind of spectacle, one that ran for nearly a quarter-century and made the hotel's name familiar to television audiences across the region. Harold Koplar's dual ownership of the broadcast operation and the building that housed it meant the show and its venue were inseparable, a union that outlasted the Chase Club by more than a decade.