A look back at The Chase Park Plaza Royal Sonesta St. Louis' storied history as it turns 100

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in SLM's May 2019 issue.

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As animated as a teenager with a crush, concierge Jeanne Venn bubbles over with stories about the Chase Park Plaza Royal Sonesta. It’s a mouthful of a name that spans a century of reinventions for the stately Italianate hotel. Today’s tour group steps closer as she tells them about the time Elvis wanted to take the freight elevator for privacy—and the doors opened on a deceased guest being wheeled out on a gurney. “I hope I don’t leave that way,” he deadpanned.

Then there was the time Jerry Lewis arrived with his two beloved little dogs and they had trouble adjusting to the new terrain, so the Chase swiftly re-created Las Vegas for them, roping off a small section of Maryland Plaza and adding sand and a tiny palm tree. 

And the time Count Basie bought Ella Fitzgerald a bracelet in the hotel jewelry shop and the clerks were so nonplused, they wrapped the box all fancy and forgot to slide in the bracelet, so the jeweler had to go down to the theater at 11 p.m….

When Royal Sonesta took over operations, in 2017, Venn had figured that, after decades of humoring celebs and presidents and smoothing over scandals and juggling the needs of 100-year-old residents and hip-hop stars and little kids and Tater Tot, the resident bulldog, it just might be time to retire. 

Two weeks later, she was back. The new owners were beginning to realize that the Chase was not just another hotel. They wanted Venn to give history tours, telling the funny, glitzy, and poignant stories of the previous 10 decades.

Today’s tour group steps closer as she tells them about the time Elvis wanted to take the freight elevator for privacy—and the doors opened on a deceased guest being wheeled out on a gurney. “I hope I don’t leave that way,” he deadpanned.

As a little girl, she’d pored over glamorous photos of her parents—who were not otherwise glamorous—sipping cocktails at the Chase, her mother full-skirted, with a fetching tiny hat and matching gloves. In junior high, Jeanne and her friends slurped mile-high “sun-duhs” (pronounced the St. Louis way) at the Chase soda fountain. When she married, it was to a pianist who played regularly at the Chase. And when she applied to be a publicist for the hotel’s new Baggy Pants Revue, her sixth interview was with the entertainment director, an ex–Broadway dancer who stood about 5-4 with a Beatle haircut and a cigarette forever stuck in his mouth. “Venn, Venn,” he muttered. “You related to Dave Venn? Helluva piano player. You’re hired.”

She eventually became chief concierge—and now Royal Sonesta intends to make the lobby she’s presided over as elegant as it was in 1922. Rooms have been redone in metallic champagne leather, robin’s egg–blue upholstery, and rich dark-brown accents and the straw-yellow hallways repapered in a silvered birch white. Workers are tuckpointing the Chase’s exterior and replacing any broken terra-cotta. The lobby will be renovated this summer—although management prefers the word “reimagined” so no one thinks of noise and chaos. The idea is to keep everything as smooth as a freshly made bed, with the hotel staying open throughout. 

St. Louisans, meanwhile, watch anxiously: Don’t take away this rich history. Don’t strip the patina. Don’t destroy our memories. 

“The good news,” says longtime Park Plaza resident Jim Espy, “is that the renovations are beautiful. They’re keeping the light fixtures in the Khorassan Room, and they’re not touching the Art Deco in the Starlight Room except to enhance it. They know what they have.”

Breaking Records

The Chase Hotel opened September 29, 1922, nine stories high and built in just nine months. Owner Chase Ullman introduced his coup as the “largest and costliest residential hotel in any city approaching St. Louis in size.” Smart and swank, it had brought a bit of New York to the corner across from Forest (our Central) Park.

Architect Preston Bradshaw took the Chase’s arches and courtyard straight out of the Italian Renaissance, and the marble and ornamental plasterwork inside made the hotel palatial. Features included a roof garden, “the first on any West End hotel,” as well as a large palm room, two ballrooms, 12 private dining rooms, and Turkish steam baths and “rubbing rooms” (separate, of course) for men and women.

The Rolling Stones stayed at the Chase in 1966. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis staged one of their first nightclub appearances at the Chase. Then Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. showed up, slouched and louche, to offer the drollery of the Rat Pack.

On the Chase’s first New Year’s Eve, in 1922, Prohibition was in force. Figuring that if anybody was going to try to sneak in booze, it’d be there, lawmen strode into the Palm Room in long coats and low-brimmed hats. During the raid, one of the agents allegedly lifted a lady’s skirt, thinking it was a tablecloth hem. When she shrieked, her companion rose to defend her, and in the ensuing melee, somebody threw a tray. Espy collects the hotel’s memorabilia, and he has a nicked silver tray engraved “New Year’s Eve 1922”; he hopes like hell it’s that one.

The Chase changed hands seven times in its first decade, then went into foreclosure during the Great Depression. In 1929, an Art Deco jewel, the 27-floor Park Plaza, was built next door by Sam Koplar—who promptly lost it in the crisis and took a job as manager of the Chase. He started buying Chase bonds, and meanwhile, a rabbi friend organized enough donations that Koplar was able to buy the Park Plaza back from the insurance company. He was careful to pay his debt of gratitude: That rabbi’s son, Julian Miller, lived rent-free in the Chase for years, gathering up gossip as the editor of Prom magazine. By 1947, the Koplar family controlled both hotels; in 1961, they were physically joined. 

A City Within a City

Over the decades, the Chase Park Plaza has had its own generator, its own gas pumps, a print shop, a telegraph office, a two-level chocolate shop, a jewelry store, a drugstore, a barber shop, a hair salon, a Poodle Palace for residents’ pups, a giant laundry, a paint shop, a chicken-pluckin’ room (on a good day, about 1,200 chickens landed), seven full-service kitchens, a sub-basement where feral cats kept mice away, a sewing and drapery department, an antique shop and art gallery, an upholstery and decorating shop that handled all the damasks and velvets for the interior designer in residence, Walter Reed. Pastries and croissants and chocolate truffles were, still are, made from scratch, and back in the ’70s, Mr. Finch made ice cream that “made Baskin-Robbins look like amateur hour,” recalls Dan Rosen, then general manager. “When he retired, we must have gone through four or five ice cream makers; finally we had to shut it down. Nobody could make ice cream like Mr. Finch.”

The Zodiac 

In the ’20s and ’30s, people danced under the stars on the roof of the Chase. In the 1940s, the Koplars enclosed the roof garden with glass and built a serious bandstand. Neighbors complained of “pandemonium” when the music heated up, but the only consequence was a $5 fine set by a judge who declared that the “South American rhythms and undiluted swing” were “as much noise as music.”

At the other end of the Starlight Roof was a 20-foot glass bar etched with the zodiac signs. It encircled a silver Art Deco statue of a woman gazing upward; on fine nights, a circle in the ceiling was slid open, showing her the stars. Comedian Billy De Wolfe once jumped up on the zodiac bar and did a tap dance, shoes ringing against the glass surface. Heavy metal guitarist Paul Gilbert went one better, climbing up onto the large statue during his act.

The Chase’s bars, clubs, and ballrooms saw a lot of talent early. Violinist Bobby Swain led the orchestra—backing up Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, and Liberace—before joining the St. Louis Symphony. The Rolling Stones stayed at the Chase in 1966. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis staged one of their first nightclub appearances at the Chase. Then Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. showed up, slouched and louche, to offer the drollery of the Rat Pack.

Begged for scandal, Venn grins. The night Sinatra failed to show up for his booked-solid concert, she says, everybody was in a tizzy. Turned out Ava Gardner had thrown her engagement ring out the window and he’d taken too many sleeping pills. He showed up the following night.

Celebrity Quirks

Practically every POTUS since 1922 has stayed at the Chase, and each has had his own style. Harry Truman refused the hotel’s elegant pressed duck, requesting a ham and cheese on white and a glass of milk instead. Eleanor Roosevelt took the trouble to write a gracious thank-you note for the flowers in her room. Nancy Reagan wanted bananas in her room. George H.W. Bush forgot his raincoat at the Chase cinema, then had a hankering for a large popcorn and sent the Secret Service guys down to get it. 

Entertainers had livelier eccentricities. Sammy Davis Jr. insisted on having a special strawberry soda in his suite. Magician Doug Henning showed up with his wife, his leopard, and his tiger; the cats slept in a truck on the Lindell parking lot. Red Skelton parked himself in the lobby and entertained all comers, then drew a little clown in colored pencil on his thank-you note, writing that Venn’s kindness “makes one feel less a stranger.”

“You wish and hope the walls could talk,” Chase sales and marketing director Frederik Houben says with a twinkle.

It’s said that sportswriter Jerome Holtzman was at the Chase when he came up with the formula for Major League Baseball’s saves stat. Liza Minnelli offered to sing the slogan “The Chase is the place” for a KPLR-TV commercial. The legendary pool player Minnesota Fats once danced at the Chase for 48 hours straight (a charity fundraiser) and afterward bragged that women had lined up to pay $100 to be his partner. Movie stars arced through the hotel lobby like comets, leaving light trails.

The most dazzling celebs were pulled onto Harry Fender’s radio show. A native of St. Louis, Fender had gone off to New York to do vaudeville. Asked to be leading man in the Ziegfeld Follies, he got stage fright, came home, and became a police detective. Entertainment still made his pulse race, though, so he hosted a live radio show in the Steeplechase Room, catching celebs as they came through the Chase. Sam’s son Harold Koplar, heir to the city-within-a-city, suggested that Fender use the sleek and sexy Zodiac Lounge, but the host shook his head: “I want to go where business ain’t.” 

“You wish and hope the walls could talk,” Chase sales and marketing director Frederik Houben says with a twinkle. They’ve seen many an affair (we won’t mention the gubernatorial one) and casual assignation. “A few people supposedly had a date or two with George Clooney,” says Espy. 

“There was always a little hanky-panky going on,” acknowledges Venn. “One woman used to hang out in the bar, get angry at her husband, and throw glasses at the mirror. The story was that she was having an affair with one of the hotel employees, and one night her husband came home earlier than expected and hid in the apartment closet…”

The employee escaped. Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t. Sheriff’s deputies were waiting in the sold-out crowd at his 1980 New Year’s Eve concert, ready to arrest him for transporting a minor across state lines. Chase employees led the rock-and-roller across the catwalks, right over the deputies’ heads, and when they whipped back the curtain, there he was, already onstage. The sheriff let him do the show.

The Iconic Pool 

A golden sheen of eros still hangs over the pool the Koplars installed in 1954, about the shade of the gold lamé briefs Rudolf Nureyev is rumored to have worn there. The pool’s barely clad bathers and the nude and billowy Great Bather statue caused so many accidents on Lindell that the hotel had to erect a high fence. Portholes in the men’s and women’s locker rooms—creepy by today’s standards—revealed the swimmers underwater. (They’ve long since been covered.)

Mick Jagger hung out at the Chase pool. KPLR-TV (the call letters a clue) used to do its Saturday newscast there, the announcer floating in an inner tube and holding a mic suspended from a bamboo pole. Actor Herschel Bernardi sashayed through the lobby in his trunks and robe, blithely ignoring the “No Bathing Suits in the Lobby” sign. An unnamed gentleman (“He’s still acting,” murmurs Venn) had to be pulled out of the pool for skinny-dipping at 2 a.m. And once Bob Prince, voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates, dived into the pool from a third-floor window on a wager with some of the players. Narrowly missing the diving board, he won the $100. The Koplars nearly had a heart attack and hastily put a metal barrier across the windows. 

Waltzing and Wrestling in the Khorassan Room 

In 1957, new construction technology made it possible to build a ballroom with clear sightlines, no pillars obstructing anyone’s view of the stage. The Khorassan Room had a newfangled thin-shell ceiling, and before the concrete set, Gerber baby food cans were inserted to make 2-inch holes. Rubber balls were stuffed into the ceiling temporarily, then fiberglass was blown in, creating marvelous acoustics. The light fixtures were designed to twinkle like stars. 

A triumph of technology and common sense, the mystical Khorassan became the home of St. Louis’ annual Veiled Prophet Ball and a million other events—father-daughter banquets, ACLU fundraisers, Soldan High reunions, fashion shows, political victory parties. In 1964, the Khorassan was the site of St. Louis’ 200th birthday party. For decades, it was the place where the city celebrated its milestones.

It was also, for a time, the place where men in black tie smoked cigars and drank whiskey as they watched “Dick the Bruiser” Afflis wrap his thick, sweaty arms around André the Giant as Joe Garagiola (and later his brother Mickey) announced the play-by-play. Like as not, Dick the Bruiser would scramble out of the ring after the match, take a bite from a fan’s dinner plate, pick up another guy’s drink, and pour it over his head as he jogged into the hotel lobby. Wrestling at the Chase held a cult fascination, mixing testosterone and comic showmanship with fine linen napery and ladies in satin gowns.

Elephants have ridden upstairs in the freight elevator, horses have pranced into the Khorassan Room, “and the Clydesdales just walk through the side door into the lobby,” Venn says, taking the fond tone you’d use for a family friend.

The archaic definition of the word “glamour” is “enchantment,” and the Chase offered that as well. Couples canoodled on the intimate dance floor at Marty’s Make-Believe Ballroom, watched carousel horses gallop by in the Merry-Go-Round lounge, partied in The Berries and, later, The Boom Boom Room. In the rhinestone cowboy era, the Zodiac turned into a glittering cowboy bar; one night, a steer came up for a drink. The Tack Room was open all night long, so you could order cheese blintzes at 3 a.m. and maybe see Carmen Miranda at the next table. 

Sedate tea dancing quickly gave way to the Charleston, then the samba, mambo, and cha-cha. The best swing bands in the country played the Starlight Roof, the music broadcast across the nation. When comedian Louie Anderson checked in, he asked to go up to the Starlight Room, because his dad had been a musician and little Louie used to listen on the radio and imagine the place where his dad was playing. “He got up here,” says Venn, “and started to cry.”

Plenty of small, tender family memories are swept into the corners of the Chase—but there’s also been enough spectacle to freeze colorful images in anybody’s brain. Elephants have ridden upstairs in the freight elevator, horses have pranced into the Khorassan Room, “and the Clydesdales just walk through the side door into the lobby,” Venn says, taking the fond tone you’d use for a family friend.

The Naked Ladies

Aiming for what we now know as Mid-century Modern, the Koplars had the ornate columns of the Chase’s grand corridor and lobby covered with wood veneer, the marble carpeted over, and the medallioned ceilings hidden above acoustical tile. The new lobby was sleeker, lower, flatter, darker—and the loss of elegance wouldn’t be remedied until the ’90s. Hotel engineer Paul Smith says the architect for that later renovation, Joe Klitzing, told him that “when they brought the plaster guys out of retirement to work on the ceiling, they had to shorten the coffering of the ceiling, so they had to change the pattern.” Smith points up at the elaborately frosted wedding cake ceiling. “The mandate was: Don’t repeat the naked lady. Just flowers in a vase.” He chuckles. “I don’t think anybody even knew there were naked ladies up there.”

Inside the cinema, he continues, “there are some remaining sections of ornamental plasterwork from 1922, but you’d have to be on a ladder and know where they were to find them. The carved marble returns from the bottom of the staircase are buried under the ADA ramp. I’m told that there was a sunken bar where the conference center is now, and they buried it in foam and poured concrete over it.”

Smith came to the Chase when it was reopening after that shuttered decade. “One of the best experiences I ever had,” he calls it. “You get to know a building in a way you can’t later; you get to know the bones of the place. I’d walk around wondering, ‘Where does this door go?’ My favorite spot was the top of the Park Plaza, what’s now a penthouse on the 27th floor. I used to go up there and watch the storms roll in. The basilica roof shines like a diamond, and you see a full panorama of the city.”

Eloise

Daryl Rosen-Huitt was 3 when her family moved to the Chase; her dad, Dan Rosen, would be its general manager for the next six years. Soon Daryl was doing cartwheels down the long halls and taking her friends trick-or-treating from door to door (the permanent residents having been warned in advance). At Thanksgiving, the orphaned German chef and British staffers ate with the Rosens. Myrtle the Elevator Lady, one of Daryl’s special friends, came and made the gravy while Daryl’s mom, who’d never needed to learn to cook, ran the elevator for her. 

Most nights, the Rosens ate in one of the hotel restaurants. Tomboy Daryl wasn’t wild about dressing up for the Hunt Room’s fancy Sunday brunch—one of the first of its kind—but she sneaked more than her share of sticky caramel-pecan rolls. The Sea Chase was too fancy, too, but she loved looking at the lobsters swimming beneath the 11-foot replica of the Sea Witch (used in The Wreck of the Mary Deare, starring Charlton Heston). She remembers Alberto Villalobos as a debonair and kindly presence, though she never knew his backstory. 

“Many people in St. Louis own pieces of the Chase and the Park Plaza,” Smith remarks, his tone wistful.

Villalobos had just arrived from Mexico when he met Sam Koplar. “If you stick with me, I’ll take care of you for life,” Koplar said. Villalobos, 16, helped dig the foundation of the Park Plaza for 11 cents an hour. He’d eventually manage several Chase lounges. In his mid-nineties, he was still donning a tuxedo every night and making the long walk from his apartment to the Park Plaza lobby, his cane reflecting in his black patent leather shoes. Once he arrived, he’d sit at the desk, greeting people, telling stories, and napping. “That was the other things about the Chase,” Rosen-Huitt says. “Everybody there really enjoyed what they were doing. I don’t know that people enjoy their lives like they used to.”

She shakes off the mood with a short laugh. “It sets your life up to be very unrealistic. I think I lived in a dream world for a while. I felt like a princess.” 

The End?

In 1983, G.E. Capital bought both buildings and did a $12 million renovation of the Park Plaza, reopening it as an apartment building five years later. But on the hotel side, revenue was dropping sharply, and the chains downtown and near the airport were luring away business. G.E. closed the Chase in 1989 and, in 1991, auctioned off its contents. “Many people in St. Louis own pieces of the Chase and the Park Plaza,” Smith remarks, his tone wistful. Everything went: serving dishes, desks, soap, china, mirrors, chandeliers. Drinks once slid across a glossy bar adorned with the MGM lion, witness to many a movie deal—but that, too, was sold. Photographs and files were destroyed; even the imprint of the original grandeur would be lost over the next decade as pigeons roosted in the shuttered building and the mildewy damp ate away its shiny surfaces. 

“People’s tastes change; people are fickle,” bandleader Buddy Moreno glumly told a Chicago Tribune reporter. “But there was never anything like the Chase, nothing that had the glamour or the shows.” The other clubs he’d played in New York and Chicago “were much colder and stuffier,” he added. “The Chase was always much warmer.” He meant it; he’d chosen the Chase for his own wedding.

Unlikely Saviors

Jim Smith was a tall, silver-haired real estate agent whose family values and conscientious niceness fit neatly intoSt. Louis’ civic landscape. Most deals were just business to him, but the Chase had captured his imagination. He had the listing from G.E., which was eager to sell the shuttered Chase. A 31-year-old developer, William Stallings—a former pro soccer player with the St. Louis Steamers who became an undercover ATF agent, then started a printing business, then made a killing on real estate—was determined to buy the entire complex and revive it. Dubious at first, Smith agreed to partner with him. 

The two made an odd couple. 

“Jim gave the project a lot of credibility,” recalls Harman Moseley, who agreed to open the Chase Park Plaza Cinemas as part of their renovation. “He was St. Louis’ top real estate broker, and he was the rock of Gibraltar: solid, conventional, by the book, wore a suit. Stallings liked to party and had a lot of girlfriends.”

Together, the playboy and the pillar of the community launched a $125 million renovation in 1999. After several delays, the renovated Chase reopened, its Starlight Room sparkling and its lobby opulent again, with a cinema across from the Grand Corridor bar. 

Soon after the grand opening, Stallings was banished. 

“People’s tastes change; people are fickle,” bandleader Buddy Moreno glumly told a Chicago Tribune reporter. “But there was never anything like the Chase, nothing that had the glamour or the shows.”

In 2006, a Dallas-based reinvestment trust, Behringer Harvard, bought in. Smith retained a small ownership share and continued managing the hotel until 2013, when Behringer accused him of using hotel revenue to make personal tax payments. According to the St. Louis Business Journal, Smith said his firm leased the hotel and was sole owner of its income, which showed up on his personal returns.

“Truth be told, there were people out to bring him down,” says hotel engineer Paul Smith. “Jim Smith cared for everyone who worked here… As much as I loved that man, someone would have to slap the evidence in front of my face for me to think he did anything wrong.”

In 2017, Behringer Harvard sold to a Boston company, Hospitality Properties Trust, for $94 million—and used most of that sale price to pay off more than $60 million in Chase debt. Royal Sonesta would manage the hotel.

Smith didn’t live to see the next transformation. He died in December 2017 when the small plane he was piloting crashed near Spirit of St. Louis Airport. Stallings was already gone; he’d bought a nightclub called The Cheetah, been convicted of two felonies, and died in his sleep at 47, his paid obit providing few details.

Movie Time

This April 1, the Chase Park Plaza Cinemas celebrate their 20th anniversary. “Governor Bill Holden was here for the opening,” recalls Moseley. Initially he’d wanted the Khorassan Room for his theater—no columns!—but young Stallings had redirected him. “I went along with it,” Moseley says with a shrug. “It seemed so unlikely. He was so young to be doing that big a project.”

On the theater walls went trompe l’oeil skylines of the world’s great cities. The lobby was opulent and cozy at once. Organist Gerry Marian set the tone, still does. Celebs rented the theater at off times: “We get a call: Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band are in town, and they want to see The Planet of the Apes,” Moseley recalls. “Cher rented out the entire auditorium of Road to Perdition one Sunday. Snoop and Jay-Z rented it after midnight for a private screening. Barack Obama spoke in theater No. 3, stumping for Claire McCaskill. 

“You never knew who was going to walk in the door,” Moseley continues. “One night Mike Roberts called me and said, ‘Come downstairs. I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.’ It was Dick Gregory. We sat down across the hall and started drinking wine and talking. It was a late night. And then we went in and watched Chicago.” Memories keep coming, one after another, the way you eat popcorn during a thriller. “It’s still my favorite theater,” he says, “even when somebody pulls the fire alarm on a Friday night. The Chase was always the place.”

Ambience You Can’t Fake

In the 1990s, you could rent a studio apartment at the Park Plaza for $600 a month. The place had the worn elegance and warmth of an old London hotel in the war years, and its past still shone in the marble and brass, the spiral staircase off the lobby, the Art Deco detailing. In 2006, the owners came to their fiscal senses and coolly converted to luxe condos, some costing more than $4 million. Those kicked out during the conversion included Virginia Masters of the famed Masters & Johnson sex research team and Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan; manager Tony La Russa was living next door at the Chase.

The Tenderloin Room stayed open during the renovation, with Barbara Gabriela sitting at a white baby grand piano playing Mid-century jazz and swing standards. She’d stuffed Christmas lights into the guts of the piano, and they sparkled through its plexiglass top. 

“She always wore a formal gown with evening gloves, her hair up,” recalls Thom Fletcher, a fan, “and to her right was an older gentleman who always wore a bow tie.” Fletcher was younger than either by decades, and he and his friends “spent a lot of our nights listening to deafening bands in basement bars, with cigarette smoke thick as gravy. But I was won over by Barbara Gabriela, and I started going regularly on my own. I dressed up for it, wearing a tie, and I sang Fats Waller—it was allowed there. I went because it was more genuine than anything offered by the young bands trying to re-create the world. Barbara Gabriela knew manners; she had an ironclad grace and dignity that made everything there make perfect sense. She wasn’t there ironically, and neither was the gentleman with the bow tie, and neither was I.”

The Power to Do Anything

Women used to steer dates to the Chase just to see what other women were wearing. But no matter how exquisite the gowns or pricey the pepperloin, there was always a piece of the Chase Park Plaza that was attainable. All sorts of people came to live, work, or play in this city within a city. Teenage girls could go to the soda fountain; young singles could party in the basement discotheque; a bellman could get a job there and stay for life. 

“In 2001, I was working at the Mayfair [Hotel], and a coworker said, ‘Come out to the Chase,’” recalls bellman Roderick Jelks. “I’d worked in housekeeping, so I was nervous about it, but he said I had a personality that would fit, so I kind of believed him. I’d never been to the Chase before, but I knew all about it from wrasslin’—we’d sit there and watch it on Sunday mornings; that was a ritual in our home. 

“When I started the job, they told us we had the power to do anything for our guests,” Jelks says. “If they wanted a helicopter, it was our job to get it.” 

Jelks was a little starstruck at first, but Gladys Knight chatted with him about his mom, and Harry Belafonte was a regular guest: “We’d sit there 15, 20 minutes in his room and just talk. He told me he was the first black man who ever was let into the hotel.” 

Jackie Robinson might actually hold that honor; he’d broken baseball’s color line when he took first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and he broke the Chase’s color line six years later. Venn says Belafonte told her he was the first black man to swim in the Chase pool, built the following year. And Lena Horne may have been the first African-American woman to stay: She once reminisced to Venn about the time she told Harold Koplar, “If I’m good enough to sing here, I’m good enough to stay here,” and he swiftly agreed.

The Immortal (If Only) Hack

Henry “Hack” Ulrich Jr. was a busboy at the Chase in 1936, right out of high school. He left briefly to play pro baseball and serve in World War II, then returned to preside over the Chase Club. He met the woman who would become his wife, Eleanor Clark, at the Chase—she was a cigarette girl—and they worked side by side for more than 35 years.

But no matter how exquisite the gowns or pricey the pepperloin, there was always a piece of the Chase Park Plaza that was attainable. All sorts of people came to live, work, or play in this city within a city.

Hack—nobody called him anything but—knew how to charm genteel elderly couples, giggly debutantes, rough-edged Teamsters, celebs and sports stars and politicians. He presided smoothly over New Year’s Eve celebrations, saying of the couples crowding the dance floor, “You couldn’t get peanut butter between them.” When the club closed, in 1961, he took over as maître d’ and manager of the Tenderloin Room. He created the special steak sauce now called Tenderloin Sauce, and he loved to show little kids how he could rub a lobster’s underside and soothe it to sleep. When the Karagiannis family came over as refugees from Greece, he took the boys under his wing. They went on to run the Spiro’s restaurants—and now run the Tenderloin Room.

Low-lit and Old World gracious, the Tenderloin has mahogany paneling, fireplaces, and multitiered chandeliers from one of the old Vandeventer Place mansions. Sink into one its crimson velvet chairs and order a Manhattan and filet mignon, and you could be in old New York. 

Hack’s absence, though, leaves a hole.

When ball clubs stayed at the Chase, he pitched batting practice for them. When Gussie Busch went into the hospital, he’d call and say, “Hack, what are you gonna feed me tonight? I can’t eat this hospital food,” and Hack would bring him steak. Toward the end of his life, Hack was hospitalized for a heart condition, and Jack Buck announced on TV that Hack’s friends all over the country needed to know he was doing OK.

Curator in Residence

“For me, this is home,” announces Jim Espy. “I get to live here. When I first moved in, in 1984, the Chase was grand but cracking around the edges. We had a big beautiful living room with a wonderful chandelier and the original 1929 bathtub with rust around the drain. Our air conditioning didn’t work all the time. My balcony door was so old, the snow blew in and left a white frost I could write my name in. And you know what? Nobody cared. There was no place in St. Louis better to be.” 

Before Espy lived here on his own, he boarded at Chaminade College Prep, and his parents stayed at the Chase when they visited. “As a kid, I couldn’t afford the fancy restaurants, so I ate in the Tack Room,” he says. This was before cheesecakes came from factories, and the Chase’s cheesecake, “tall and very dense, always served with fresh strawberries and whipped cream,” was something special.

“I was always trying to find the secret tunnel that took you under Lindell to the old Kings Way Hotel,” Espy adds, still sure it’s there.

“Hack latched on to me,” Espy says. “I think he just loved that I loved the hotel. He’d show me the tunnels in the basement, and we’d walk amidst the rats at midnight. He showed me where Wrestling at the Chase was, how to get in the back stairwells I still use today. Above the Sea Chase, there was a hidden dining room, Mr. Sam’s”—reserved for private occasions. “Hank took me up to the Tiara Room, too, a ballroom on the top two floors of the Park Plaza. It had this beautiful staircase with Pierrot clowns carved along the wall and backlit; they held these wands with twinkling starbursts at the tip. Siegfried Reinhardt designed china with the same clown. And Hack took me above the Tiara Room. They once had a printing press on the crown of the building, and there was a 360-degree view from a 360-degree balcony all around.

“I was always trying to find the secret tunnel that took you under Lindell to the old Kings Way Hotel,” Espy adds, still sure it’s there. (Legend records a Prohibition tunnel stocked with cases of fine whiskey; Smith says it never existed. “I have digital images of the original blueprints. You’ll say, ‘Well, Paul, they wouldn’t put that on a blueprint…’”) 

Espy goes on eBay every week to hunt for Chase Park Plaza memorabilia (“Don’t tell anybody!”) and actually owns that silver statue from the Zodiac bar. Ron “Johnny Rabbitt” Elz, who’s writing a book about the Chase, keeps angling to get it donated to the Legacy Room he helped set up in the hotel basement.

Royalty Takes the Reins

Did the social whirl just look like more fun in the Roaring ’20s, the romantic ’40s, the Camelot ’60s? Maybe people just partied a little more brightly, polished themselves a little shinier, to escape life’s trials for a time. Since then, a lot of fun’s been simple indulgence or retro nostalgia. But in the Chase’s heyday, a good time was something people planned for, dressed up for, relished. The hotel spelled fun for all of St. Louis, not to mention all the famous actors, athletes, playwrights, and politicians who borrowed its playground. 

“I’d love to be able to walk on the rooftop with a big band playing,” says Espy, “or just sit at the Zodiac again.” Houben, the sales and marketing director, would love to go back to the’60s: “The parties were a lot more sophisticated. Now I see my own children and say, ‘You’re really going out dressed like that?’” Venn dreams of the elegance of the ’30s, prewar but post-Prohibition. Smith would choose the ’20s: “Much as I love what I see now, I know what it looked like in 1922 from the blueprints, and I think I’d be even more in love with this place.”

The hotel spelled fun for all of St. Louis, not to mention all the famous actors, athletes, playwrights, and politicians who borrowed its playground.

Now, though, the old elegance is being restored, even amped up a little. Check in, and a bellhop will run your bags to your room. “If you want Dom Perignon, definitely come to the Chase Park Plaza Royal Sonesta, because Korbel may not be served,” teases Houben. He says he’s interested not in being No. 1 in the usual competitive sense but instead in being beloved, touching people’s emotions and playing a unique role in their lives. Venn has already noticed, from her perch in the lobby, that people seem to be dressing better.  

Paul Smith grins, remembering how the new owners “thought they were going to go check out this hotel in St. Louis. Well, it’s not just a hotel, heads and beds. It’s not ‘Hey, it’s 289 keys, and this is how much it will cost to renovate.’ They learned that very quickly, in the due diligence phase. They got here and realized there was a city inside.”