Hotel Jerome

Aspen in 1889 was a silver town with ambitions far beyond its size. That year Jerome B. Wheeler, a New York merchant who had become a partner in Macy's and then one of the principal investors in the valley's mines and smelters, opened a three-storey brick hotel on Main Street and gave it his first name. The Hotel Jerome still stands on the same corner, now run by Auberge Resorts Collection, and no grand hotel in Aspen is older.

History

Wheeler built the Jerome and, a block away, the Wheeler Opera House in the same year, two buildings meant to show that Aspen was a city and not a camp. The hotel had electric light and running water, rare comforts in the Rockies at the time, and it served the mine owners, engineers and investors who came up the valley. The silver crash of 1893 ended all that. Aspen shrank, Wheeler lost most of his fortune, and the hotel drifted through the quiet years with rooms let cheaply to the miners who stayed on. During Prohibition the bar was turned into a soda fountain, and the drink remembered from those years, the Aspen Crud, was a milkshake with bourbon added.

After the Second World War, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke of Chicago, who were remaking Aspen as a ski resort and a meeting place for ideas, took on the hotel as a base for their visitors. Skiers, musicians and writers followed, and the Jerome became the place where the new Aspen drank and talked. Later owners renovated it more than once. Auberge Resorts took over its management and reopened it in 2013 after a long restoration.

Architecture and design

The building is red brick, three storeys high, in the late Victorian commercial manner of the Colorado mining towns. Its corner site at Main and Mill Streets makes it one of the fixed points of Aspen's grid, and its facade has changed little since 1889. The 2013 renovation kept the bones and the old public rooms and filled them with furniture, rugs, leather and pieces that refer to the hotel's own past, among them photographs of the mines and of the early ski years. The result feels like a Victorian hotel that has been lived in rather than restored into a museum.

Rooms and suites

There are fewer than a hundred rooms and suites, in the original building and in later additions behind it. They are generous for a nineteenth-century house, with high ceilings and big windows, and many look towards Aspen Mountain or Red Mountain. The decoration mixes Western materials, wood, leather and wool, with the Victorian proportions of the rooms.

Dining

The J-Bar is the heart of the house. Apart from its years as a soda fountain, it has served drinks since 1889, and its long wooden counter is where locals and visitors end up after a day on the mountain. Prospect, the main restaurant, cooks seasonal food with produce from Colorado. Bad Harriet, a cocktail bar on the lower floor, is the hotel's late-night room.

Weddings and events

Weddings, private dinners and small meetings are held in the hotel's event rooms, sized for a house of under a hundred bedrooms rather than a conference resort. Summer is the busy season for celebrations, when the Aspen Music Festival and the town's lectures and conferences fill the calendar.

Location

Main Street runs through the centre of Aspen, and the hotel stands at its corner with Mill Street, a few blocks from the gondola at the base of Aspen Mountain. The galleries, shops and restaurants of the town centre are a short walk from the door. Aspen/Pitkin County Airport, at Sardy Field, is about ten minutes away by car. The nearest Amtrak station is at Glenwood Springs, roughly an hour down the Roaring Fork Valley on the California Zephyr line. Snowmass, Buttermilk and Aspen Highlands are all within easy reach on the valley's buses. Of all the places to stay in town, this is the luxury hotel in Aspen with the longest memory: its guest books cover the silver years, the lean decades and the ski boom that followed.