- Architecture - Janesville Sesquicentennial
-
- [Photograph; caption reads: The Peter MYERS residence,
on the southeast corner of East Milwaukee Street and South Atwood
Avenue, was built in 1871. It burned in 1944.]
-
- Buildings that are gone - City has state's finest hotel
- Janesville's first log cabin and the first brick home.
- A plain frame courthouse and a lavishly ornamented one.
- The Hyatt House, billed as "the finest and largest hotel
in Wisconsin."
- These are historic Janesville buildings that once were that
are no more.
- Obviously, the city's first permanent structure - built in
1835 across from what's now called the Big
- Rock - is long gone, along with all the other early wood
homes.
- The city's first brick house was built by Peter MYERS,
a Frenchman, who moved to Janesville in
- 1845. He bought two lots on Prospect between Main and Parker.
On one lot he built a wooden structure as a rental unit in 1848.
That still exists at 121 N. Parker. On the other lot, facing
Main Street, he built his own home. It no longer stands.
- The city's first courthouse was built in 1842. It was a plain
frame structure which burned in 1859.
- In 1867, a new courthouse was built in Courthouse Park. It
was four stories high and lavishly ornamented. It was also demolished.
- The most spectacular of these lost buildings was the Hyatt
House, built in 1857 for the then
- staggering cost of $140,000.
- It was built at W. Milwaukee and Franklin streets, where
Equitable Savings and Loan is located.
- It was the project of the city's first mayor, A. Hyatt SMITH,
and citizens who reportedly helped back it.
- Its furniture alone was estimated to be worth about $50,000.
- Hyatt House was 155 feet long by 122 feet wide and 120 feet
high - about 40 feet higher and 40
- feet wider than the Monterey Hotel.
- Five stories high, the motel could be seen "from every
part of the city and for many miles."
- In the basement were a saloon and billiard rooms, a barber
shop, three bathing rooms and a wine
- cellar.
- On the first floor were eight stores and the main entrance
to the hotel.
- The dining room, located on the second floor, had 16-foot
ceilings. Between 400 and 500 people
- would attend dances there. Menus indicate the hotel served
meals that would be worthy of today's luxury hotels - lamb, ribs,
omelets - and drinks costing as much as $2 a pint.
- Fifty motel rooms were located on the next three floors and
connected by a circular stairway. Each
- room had fireplaces and porcelain doorknobs.
- Constructed of brick and castiron, the Hyatt House was considered
fire-proof.
- But in 1867 it burned in what was called the city's worst
fire. A hotel employee died in the blaze.
- The cause was not known, thought it apparently started in
the kitchen.
- Yet even in ashes, the Hyatt House proved to be of major
significance to Janesville.
- The fire which burned it, and other fires of the era, led
to the purchase of the city's first two steam
- fire engines in 1868.
-
- [Photograph, p. 9F; caption reads: The Hyatt House, built
for $400,000 back in 1857, burned 10 years later.]
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