The Seelbach Hotel

F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young lieutenant stationed at Camp Zachary Taylor outside Louisville in 1918, spent enough evenings at the Seelbach to use it later: in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan marries Daisy at the Muhlbach Hotel in Louisville, and the Seelbach is the house he had in mind. The Seelbach Hotel opened on Fourth Street in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 1905, built by Louis and Otto Seelbach, brothers from Bavaria who had run a restaurant and bar in the city since the 1870s.

History

The brothers hired Frank Mills Andrews, a Dayton architect, and told him to build the finest hotel in the South; it cost them close to a million dollars and was enlarged within two years. Presidents followed: William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy among them. During Prohibition Al Capone played cards in the Oakroom, where a mirror let him watch the door and a passage to the alley let him leave. The hotel closed in 1975 as downtown emptied, and a restoration brought it back in 1982. It has carried the Hilton name since the 1990s and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1975. The Seelbach cocktail, bourbon and champagne with triple sec and bitters, was presented in 1995 as a rediscovered 1917 recipe; its creator, the hotel's bar manager, admitted in 2016 that he had invented it.

Architecture and design

Andrews built in Beaux-Arts style, ten storeys of brick and stone over a lobby of marble from Italy and Switzerland, bronze fittings and a painted ceiling. Murals of Kentucky pioneer history run around the lobby walls. Below ground, the Rathskeller of 1907 is the hotel's rarest room: walls, pillars and vaulted ceiling are faced in Rookwood pottery from Cincinnati, with pelicans on the columns as symbols of good luck, and it is the only room of its kind still standing. The Grand Ballroom on the top floor and the Oakroom, the former gentlemen's billiard room, keep their original panelling.

Rooms and suites

Rooms on the ten floors vary in size, with named suites on the upper floors facing Fourth Street. Rooms on the street side hear the city at night; those at the back are quieter. Corridors and lifts keep the 1905 proportions, wide and high. Derby week, the first Saturday in May, fills the hotel a year in advance.

Dining

The Oakroom is the hotel's formal restaurant, in the panelled billiard room where Capone played, and serves a menu built on Kentucky produce and bourbon. The Old Seelbach Bar, off the lobby, is the city's reference bourbon bar and the home of the Seelbach cocktail. A café handles breakfast.

Weddings and events

The Rathskeller, the Grand Ballroom and the Oakroom are the three rooms couples ask for, the first for its Rookwood walls, the second for its scale and the third for dinners. The hotel also holds Derby parties and corporate meetings in its ballroom and smaller function rooms, and offers catering for all of them.

Location

The Seelbach stands at 500 South Fourth Street in downtown Louisville, beside the Fourth Street Live entertainment block and within walking distance of the Muhammad Ali Center, the Louisville Slugger Museum and the Ohio riverfront. Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport is about 15 minutes by car, and Churchill Downs about ten. It is the luxury hotel in Louisville with the longest memory.