Local History: The Phoenix

For nearly two-hundred years, a hotel stood at the corner of Main and Limestone streets, Lexington, Kentucky – John Adams was president when the hotel opened, Jimmy Carter was president when it closed. That's a very long time. The hotel survived fires, epidemics, and bankruptcy; it stood through the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, two world wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. It lasted through the Great Depression, segregation, civil unrest, and marginal social and political reform. Its management welcomed suffragists fighting for gender equality but turned away Black people who wanted to have a cup of coffee or rent rooms. For 182 years, and through all of its flaws, foibles, and eccentricities, the Phoenix Hotel stood as a central landmark in Lexington.

The Founding of the Phoenix

In 1797, John Postlethwaite purchased a lot on the east edge of Lexington and established a tavern on the corner of what is now Main and Limestone Streets. The tavern was a reported to be a rambling structure built of walnut and cherry, native species then as common as they are now so rare, and located within a stone's throw of the town's primary water supply. Within three short years of its opening, twelve rooms were added for overnight lodging, which marked the beginning of an unbroken 182-year span of a hotel at that site.

Whether due to its location or ambiance or better spirits at a cheaper price, the tavern and hotel quickly became the hub of business deals, culture, and repose. It served as the unofficial headquarters of the Lexington Emigration Society and the Lexington Jockey Club, both established shortly after the tavern opened its doors, and was also the place to be for those wanting to book horse races and bet upon the outcomes. It was a bustling place, hosting everything from a 650-guest dinner to celebrate the 1801 election of Thomas Jefferson, to a more contemplative evening when, in 1812, the Lexington Debating Society put forth the question, “Ought the United States declare war against Great Britain?” In 1817, a traveling orchestra, conducted by Austrian Anthony Heinrich, stopped at Postlethwaite's and played the “Menuetto” from Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 (for perspective, this while Beethoven was still alive and well).

Austrian composer/conductor Anthony Philip Heinrich

Tragedies

Tragedy first struck on March 3 1820, when the hotel and tavern burned to the ground. The loss made such an impact that hotel guests themselves started a collection to lessen the financial impact. The local newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette, quoted a guest who said, “We hope, however, it may soon rise, like a Phoenix from its ashes.” The quote was prescient because within a year it was rebuilt, and “Phoenix” later become its official name.

In 1833, like another visit from the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, this time in the form of disease, a cholera pandemic that began in India some four years earlier reached Lexington, killing over 6% of its population, and included among the dead was John Postlethwaite. Later analysis put the vector of Lexington's outbreak at the tavern itself – torrential rains caused shallow privies to overflow, with the run-off polluting the town's primary water source and nearby wells. Postlethwaite's son-in-law and a partner purchased the hotel, reopened it in September of that year, and gave it the formal name “Phoenix.”

The Phoenix Hotel, 1859

In 1879, another fire reduced the Phoenix to rubble, but true to its name, it was rebuilt yet again to an even grander version of its former self – added to the existing components of steam heat in public areas, a laundry facility, and water piped to each floor, the rebuild encompassed three stories that held 92 guest rooms and a honeymoon suite, Vermont marble in the lobby, a smoking room, telegraph office, cigar room, billiards room, a reading room, elegant bathrooms and toilets on each floor, and a landscaped atrium.

Guests both famous and infamous

With the hotel being the finest that Central Kentucky had to offer, it's not surprising that those who could afford to stay did so. Upon completion of perhaps the most epic and audacious journey in American history, the Corps of Discovery's 30-month exploration from Saint Louis to the Pacific, Meriwether Lewis stopped by on or about November 13, 1806 on his way to Washington to begin a debriefing to President Jefferson. Henry Clay's wife sold eggs and milk to the hotel that were raised by enslaved people at the slave labor camp known as Ashland. On his 24-state tour of America, the Marquis de Lafayette stayed for over a week. Confederate generals drank, dined, and partied at the Phoenix. Confederate Vice President John Breckinridge stopped by the Phoenix for a drink of Old Crow bourbon before being run out of town by a Union troop sent to arrest him. General George Armstrong Custer not only stayed at the Phoenix but also negotiated the purchase of a horse, “Victory,” that he later rode into battle at Little Big Horn (while General Custer didn't fare well at the battle, there is no word if his horse lived to ride another day).

Custer’s horses, Dandy and Vic

In its long history, no less than seven presidents or future presidents were guests: Presidents James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Chester Author, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. Texas President Sam Houston was a guest. George Spencer Churchill and his wife, Lilian Warren Price, the 8th Duke and Duchess of Marlbourgh, were given a suite of rooms during their stay. Suffragists met and strategized means to achieve voting equality at meetings held in the 1910s.

George Charles Spencer Churchill, the 8th Duke of Marlborough

In 1961, two Black team members of the Boston Celtics – Sam Jones and Tom Sanders, both later inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame – who were in Lexington to play an exhibition game, were denied service at the hotel's restaurant, the waitress telling them that it was policy “not to serve Negroes.” Celtics team members Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Sam Jones, and Tom Sanders refused to play in the exhibition and promptly returned home. The hotel changed its policy to allow “Negros to stay if they were part of a team or convention, but not singly.” The Congress of Racial Equality picketed the Phoenix and other segregated businesses in downtown Lexington, and in December, Louis Armstrong, who was in town to play a concert, refused to cross the picket line, thus canceling the event.

The Phoenix was the site of pool tournaments from the 1930s through the 1970s. There were countless holiday and birthday parties, Easter dinners, prom dances, retirement celebrations, cotillions, weddings, reunions, hopeful rendezvous and illicit assignations. For some years, WVLK radio station (AM 590) broadcast from the top floor, a barbershop and shoe shine stand were in the basement, and a bar with pool tables, a smoke shop, a nicities shop with toiletries, magazines, candies, and bric-a-brac were on the first floor. High-stakes poker was known to take place, especially when Keeneland was running or the yearling sales were happening. During Prohibition, Scotch and Canadian whiskey, French wines, and Irish beer could be had. There were crystal chandeliers (two of which were rescued and are now at Louisville's Seelbach Hotel), wool rugs graced marble lobby floors, and a fine dining restaurant, tobacconist, barbershop, and coat-check were in place. The lamps that stood at the entrance can now be found at the University of Kentucky's Administration Building. It had it all. In its final iteration, the Phoenix rose ten stories with 400 guest rooms.

The Phoenix Beyond the Building

The influence of the Phoenix extended into the worlds of fiction and Hollywood via its impact on one of Lexington's truly great writers, Walter Tevis.

Tevis spend much of his teenage years reading science fiction and playing pool with his best friend, Toby Kavanaugh, whose father bought a pool table for his house on South Ashland Avenue. Tevis and Kavanaugh were both passionate about pool and, according to his first wife, “As young boys, Walt and Toby watched the pros playing for big money at the Phoenix Hotel” trying to leave the marks penniless without them knowing they had been played for fools. Pool hustlers with names like Rudolph “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone, William “Wimpy” Lassiter, and Bille “Cornbread Red” Burge followed something akin to a gambling circuit, and the Phoenix was a regular stop.

Walter and Jamie Tevis, 1960

Walter Tevis drew from his memories of watching professional players at the Phoenix when he wrote and submitted his first short story, “The Best in the Country,” which was about a fictional pool legend. That story was followed by “The Big Hustle,” which was another story about pool halls and gambling. Both stories were bought and published by Esquire and Collier's magazines, respectively – a writer selling their first two stories to major national magazines is somewhat akin to a first-time batter hitting back-to-back home runs in the World Series. Continuing the theme, Tevis wrote his first novel, “The Hustler,” which was later made into a major motion picture starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. Three of his other novels were also purchased for movie right: “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” starring David Bowie; “The Color of Money,” starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise; and, “The Queen's Gambit,” staring Ann Taylor-Joy.

Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman, “The Hustler”

End

Corporate arrangements and consumer habits change. The 1950s saw the beginnings of the “suburbanization of America,” which involved the development of large-scale housing projects outside of urban areas, accompanying strip malls, and later large-scale indoor shopping malls dominated “anchor stores” and national retail chain stores. The impact on independent retail stores located in downtown areas was devastating. Consumers were drawn by the convenience of adjacent free parking and climate-controlled indoor shopping with a multitude of stores all under one roof.

In Lexington, three large shopping malls were built in the 1960s and early 1970s, and downtown retail shopping collapsed. Hotels development preceded the trend, with the construction of modernist hotels built on the outskirts of Lexington in the 1950s – the Campbell House Inn, the Springs Inn, and the Continental Inn. Business at the Phoenix steadily decreased, and in 1977 the doors permanently shut its doors to guests.

In 1980, Wallace Wilkinson (governor of Kentucky, 1987-1991) purchased the Phoenix for $4 million and decided that its best fate was to be demolished rather than revitalized. In its place a $123 million, 50-story skyscraper was to be built, to be known as the World Coal Center. In 1982, the Phoenix was reduced to rubble and scraped away to its foundation. A downturn in the economy and the price of coal meant that plans for the World Coal Center were abandoned, and the lot sat empty for years, known derisively as the “World Hole Center.” The lot was obtained by the city, and arrangements were made for a new central location for the Lexington Public Library to be built and a 21-story apartment building, both complemented by a parking garage and a small park, later named Phoenix Park.

At the edge of Phoenix Park, there is a plaque commemorating the hotel and an eternal flame burns, this one as a memorial to Lexington's fallen firefighters and police officers.