By Andrew Travers The Hotel Jerome’s days as a dirt-cheap boarding house and the Redstone Castle’s tumultuous history are featured in new episodes of Rocky Mountain PBS’s “Colorado Experience.”
The public television station and the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media are bringing both 30-minute documentaries to Aspen tonight for a free screening at the Jerome. This “‘Colorado Experience’ Road Show” has toured statewide since 2015, with interactive events in the places the series covers.
“It’s an opportunity for us to premiere these episodes in the communities that they relate to,” said Rocky Mountain PBS filmmaker Eric Hernandez, who directed the Redstone Castle episode and served as cinematographer on the Hotel Jerome shoot. “It’s nice to see how excited people are to connect with their local history.”
Both episodes — part of an ongoing 13-show season — use these historic buildings to tell the story of industrialization in the mountains in Colorado, the influx of money it brought and the enduring boom-and-bust economic cycle it kicked off for the Centennial State.
“Room & Board” covers the little-known history of Colorado boarding houses in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Jerome. It features on-camera commentary by Aspen Historical Society’s Nina Gabianelli. She refers to Jerome B. Wheeler — the namesake of the hotel and the Wheeler Opera House — as less an Aspen founding father and more of “our rich uncle.”
The show recounts how the Jerome’s original developers failed to pay contractors, faced lawsuits and fled town, leaving the half-built hotel behind. (This tale will sound familiar to locals who have followed the saga of Base Village’s development in Snowmass Village over the past decade.) Wheeler stepped in, funded and finished the opulent 92-room hotel with its grand ballroom, marble floors, oak fixtures and its J-Bar. At the height of the silver mining boom, it was completed in 1889 after less than a year of fevered construction.
But after the silver bust in 1893, Wheeler quickly went bankrupt and lost the hotel, which changed hands many times in the coming years until 1911 when Mansor Elisha bought it for just $3,000 in back taxes.
Elisha operated it as a boarding house in the lean years that followed, with rates so low that through the so-called “Quiet Years” that local families would move in for the winter.
“It was cheaper in the 1920s to come live (in the Jerome) than to buy coal to heat their homes,” Gabianelli says in the episode.
The hotel never closed, despite the bleak economic times and the scant population of Aspen between the silver bust and the onset of the ski era.
Its renaissance began in the late 1940s, as Aspen city father Walter Paepcke took it over and had the Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer renovate it. But even for decades afterward, through the 1980s, the Jerome continued operating — at least in part — as a boarding house. A 1985 renovation spurred its evolution into the tony hotel of today, when a single night’s stay can cost nearly as much as Mansor spent to …read more
Via:: Post Independent