“Back in 2004, I was mayor of Mason City and a lot of people came to me and said we need to do something about the hotel,” Marinos recalls. “The building was owned then by the Mason City Foundation, which restored Meredith Willson’s boyhood home and was building Music Man Square. They were trying to stabilize the building and raise the money.”
When the Mason City Foundation realized its mission should remain focused on Meredith Willson, its members backed off the stabilization of the hotel, and Marinos saw an opportunity for economic development. “I saw the hotel restoration as a way to make our downtown more viable,” she says. “I called for a group of citizens to come together and help us save this hotel.”
Several citizens stepped forward and helped create Wright on the Park. Marinos chose not to run for re-election and became president of the non-profit. It took five years for the group to put the financing together—applying for grants and state and federal historic tax credits, seeking bridge loans through the unlikely collaboration of several banks and holding fundraisers—while dealing with naysayers in town.
Borcherding recalls: “People would ask why we were putting so much money into this when our downtown is dying and there’s nothing to do [in town]. They wanted to spend money some other way but it wasn’t that easy. We were always optimistic and we told ourselves, ‘We’re going to prove you wrong’. We knew enough about Frank Lloyd Wright, and we had a pretty good indication of what his properties do for other areas.”
As Borcherding and Marinos expected, the hotel and event space (in the former bank portion) today are a huge success, attracting visitors from all 50 states and many foreign countries, as well as being the catalyst to downtown façade improvements and new businesses being established in Mason City. “Now there’s even talk of a big-name hotel being built on the other side of Central Park, which will bring in conferences to complement what our hotel can offer,” Marinos says.
Unexpected Guidance
Bringing the hotel back to its 1910 design was always important to Wright on the Park. And, like any historic-preservation project receiving tax credits from a state historic-preservation office and the Washington, D.C.-based National Park Service, the Historic Park Inn Hotel had to adhere to many restrictions in its public spaces. The hotel lobby, skylight room, mezzanine, second-floor ladies’ parlor, the law offices and corridors were required to be returned to their original intent. “When you walk down the guestroom hallways, you will see doors that don’t have knobs on them and that is to replicate the experience of the hallways as they were originally,” Borcherding notes. “Once you go in the guestrooms, you don’t see these doors because they’re buried in the wall.”
To achieve the original intent, more than a little detective work was required. Borcherding notes there were few photographs to rely on and only 23 pages of Wright’s original drawings, provided by the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which owns and manages Wright’s intellectual property.
“The drawings had been scanned and photocopied, so we started losing quality,” Borcherding recalls. “Buildings in the early 1900s were practically designed on a napkin as far as notation and details. In comparison, when we reissued construction documents to do this project, we had close to 120 pages. We had some exterior photographs and postcards to rely on, but for the interior we only had one photo from the 1930s. In a lot of places, we had to rely on what we knew about Wright’s style and what we gathered from the common spaces.”
The lack of drawings wasn’t the only challenge. The building was in horrible structural condition and not only because of years of neglect. “Wright always pushed the boundaries and limits of building materials,” Borcherding notes. “The only evidence we had of the mezzanine were his original drawings. At one point we wondered if it was even part of the original construction. It didn’t appear in that one interior photograph from the ’30s. Only after some demolition did we discover the original beam pockets, so we knew it had been there, but it probably failed miserably. It had a span of maybe 20 feet with no columns underneath it.”
The team began to uncover more details of Wright’s original design as it removed layers of remodeling that had taken place over decades. For example, as the contractor removed layers of drywall in the bank building, he discovered reflective material in the mortar joints of the brick piers between the windows. The contractor called Borcherding and the late Martha Huntington, the lead architect on the project, and they went to look at it.
3 Comments
This hotel is amazing as it has been for a long time which makes it more interesting to visit and explore.
Iowa Public Television showed the wonderful documentary about the process: THE LAST WRIGHT https://www.academicvideostore.com/video/last-wright-frank-lloyd-wright-and-rebirth-american-city
I born & raised in Mason City and remember the Park Inn building in good shape and then watched it’s decline.
My wife & I have stayed at The Park Inn about five or six times and I am truly in love with that building. What a great idea to renovate the building and put it to good use. Too many old buildings today are being torn down, I believe, unnecessarily. This is a great article describing a grand old building and the endless hours put into restoring it.