Hotel Touraine
Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, US / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hotel Touraine (1897-1966) in Boston, Massachusetts, was a residential hotel on the corner of Tremont Street and Boylston Street, near the Boston Common. The architecture firm of Winslow and Wetherell designed the 11-story building in the Jacobethan style, constructed of "brick and limestone;"[1] its "baronial" appearance was "patterned inside and out after a 16th-century chateau of the dukes of Touraine."[2] It had dining rooms and a circulating library.[3][4] Owners included Joseph Reed Whipple and George A. Turain.[5][6]
Directly across the street were the clandestine district headquarters of the Boston Communist Party mentioned in Herbert Philbrick's 1952 book "I Led 3 Lives".
Among the guests: boxer Max Baer, actor Stanley Bell,[7] Diamond Jim Brady,[8] George Gershwin,[9] Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow,[10] Pietro Mascagni,[11] Mitch Miller,[12] Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,[13] railroad builder and operator Sir William Cornelius Van Horne,[14] and Henry Bradford Endicott.[15] Events included an exhibition in the 1960s of the Boston Negro Artists Association,[16] and performances by the "Theater Company of Boston."[17] The hotel closed in 1966 and became an apartment building.[18][19]