Hotel Kaskaskia
Six stories of Marshall & Fox elegance — and rumored Prohibition speakeasy
217 Marquette Street, LaSalle, IL
Six stories. One hundred and seven rooms. Colonial Revival red brick. Designed in 1914 by Marshall & Fox of Chicago — the same firm that built the Drake and the Blackstone — for the seven Illinois Valley businessmen who called themselves the Kaskaskia Hotel Group. Governor Edward Dunne was the first guest in September 1915. Amelia Earhart slept here. So did Spike Jones and his City Slickers, the opera star Amelita Galli-Curci, and Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Chester Nimitz.
WJBC radio broadcast live from the third floor from 1928 to 1934 before the Depression sent it to Bloomington. The basement reportedly ran a speakeasy through Prohibition. A young woman jumped from a top-floor window in the 1920s; another from the roof in 1948. The elevator still opens its doors to no one. Closed in 2001 after eighty-six years. In 2003, industrialist Blouke Carus — yes, that Carus family — bought it at a sheriff's auction for one dollar to keep it from the wrecking ball.