Hotels

Many of Boston’s grand hotels of the 1800s and early 1900s have long gone out of business. But some of the buildings still remain and are among the city’s most impressive structures. Case in point: the former Vendome Hotel in Back Bay. Built in 1871, the Vendome was once the city’s most luxurious hotel and featured a ballroom for public events. With its white marble facade, the Vendome stands out from other buildings on Commonwealth Avenue, even today.

In 1968, there were plans to demolish the Vendome and build a modern, 23-story hotel and apartment tower in its place. Fortunately, that plan was nixed for zoning reasons. But a massive fire in 1972 caused the collapse of the southeast corner of the building, carrying nine firemen to their deaths and injuring eight others. A memorial honoring the firefighters was erected on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall in 1998. Today, the Vendome is made up of luxury condos, with a 1-bedroom unit currently on the market for $1.07 million.

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The Omni Parker House on Tremont Street is said to be the oldest continuously operating hotel in the U.S., having opened in 1855. But across the Charles River in Cambridge stands the building that was once the place Bostonians partied in the Roaring Twenties. The Riverbank Court Hotel, built in 1901, featured 149 guest suites and apartments along with a killer view of the Charles River and Back Bay. A 1921 profile in the “Cambridge Chronicle’’ newspaper says the Riverbank was famed for its lavish banquets and “dancing parties.’’

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The economic high of the 1920s, of course, gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s, during which the Riverbank went out of business. That was good news for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which acquired the red-brick building in 1937 and converted it into a graduate dorm. In 2011, the building was renamed Fariborz Maseeh Hall after an alum whose donation enabled MIT to extensively renovate the building, which now houses 460 undergrads. The former Riverbank Court Hotel was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

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Opportunistic universities have snapped up a couple other grand hotels in lean times. The Charlesgate Hotel was built in 1891 on the corner of Beacon and Charlesgate Streets near Kenmore Square. While it welcomed travelers, the Charlesgate was primarily a residential hotel. And among the noted Bostonians who resided there was the building’s architect, J. Pickering Putnam, whom some credit with pioneering the concept of the modern apartment building.

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By the 1940s, the Charlesgate had become a dormitory for Boston University and later for Emerson College. Since the 1990s, it’s been condos. There are lots of stories floating around about the Charlesgate being haunted. (Putnam, the architect died in the building in 1917, and someone also reportedly committed suicide there in 1905.) There are reports on the Internet from students who lived in the Charlesgate in the 1980s claiming to have seen or heard a variety of paranormal phenomena.

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Imagine the outrage this lanky building at the corner of Berkeley Street and Commonwealth Avenue caused when it went up in 1894. At the time, Back Bay had no building height restrictions.The narrow, 125-foot-tall structure, known as Haddon Hall, towers over neighboring houses on Comm. Avenue. Originally a 26-unit luxury apartment building, Haddon Hall featured reception areas on each floor for elegant parties. Aghast neighbors mobilized and pushed for legislation limiting the permissible height. As a result, in 1896 a limit of 70 feet was imposed on Commonwealth Avenue, a limit later reduced further to 65 feet. Haddon Hall has since been converted to a mix of offices and apartments.

The Hotel Tuileries building at 270 Commonwealth Avenue, seen here last autumn, was constructed in 1896 and operated as a hotel until 1921. A 1904 ad in the “Boston Evening Transcript’’ said the hotel’s “banquet, ball and reception rooms are especially adapted for private dinner and supper parties. Bellevue Orchestra available on notice.’’

The former Tuileries building has, since 1989, been one of Berklee College of Music’s swankier dormitories.