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Even though it was long ago converted to senior apartments, the Eugene Hotel holds a special place in Oregon history -- 100 years after the original opening.
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Jack Nicholson and Robert Mitchum.
Eleanor Roosevelt and Buckminster Fuller. Kirk Douglas and Michael Douglas.
And don’t forget the birth of “The Blues Brothers.”
In my twisted mind, I kind of wish all eight of those famous folks were there for that last one, on that autumn night in 1977 when someone introduced Curtis Salgado to John Belushi at the Eugene Hotel.
More on that piece of the hotel building’s storied history later.
First, let’s recognize that Sunday, June 15, marks a century since the Eugene Hotel opened and became the city’s premier gathering spot.
For the past 42 years, the historic seven-story building has housed the Eugene Hotel Retirement Community and will hold a public celebration Saturday, June 14, to mark its 100th birthday.
“I just love this building,” said Mandi Bell, the executive director of the retirement community at 222 E. Broadway.
Bell, 45, never heard of the place when she walked through its doors in 1999, still a teenager, looking for work and has been there pretty much ever since, starting as a housekeeper and working her way to management.
“I love the history and the residents,” she said.
It would be hard to find a place in town with more history than the Eugene Hotel. The University of Oregon’s Hayward Field, a piece of hallowed ground if not the current space-age structure, has been around a tad longer, but I don’t think future presidents and movie stars ever slept there.
Elvis Presley performed at McArthur Court during Thanksgiving weekend in 1976, and famously took the entire third floor of the Valley River Inn, along with his entourage, but the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll was just one guy.
So let’s take a trip down memory lane and discover the who, what, when, where, why and how of the place the folks who live and work there still call “The Grand Old Dame.”
‘From the north and south’
“New Eugene Hotel Opens to Public: Another Step Forward in Eugene’s History,” was the banner headline on a special section in the June 15, 1925 Eugene Guard.
Atop the building was a huge electric “Eugene Hotel” sign: 14-feet wide, 32-feet high and 75-feet long.
“Newcomers arriving will have little trouble finding it,” the Guard wrote. The largest sign in what was then a city of about 15,000 “will emblazon forth the name to all who approach from the north and south.”
Long before Interstate 5 was built and before commercial airline travel became accessible and affordable, cross-country travel was made by train or car.
Then, Highway 99 was the main route from California, all the way to Portland. It ran along present-day Franklin Boulevard and Sixth Avenue in Eugene on the way to Junction City and Corvallis.
The Eugene Train Depot was in the same spot it is today, at the base of Skinner Butte, on the north end of Willamette Street.
Either way, you couldn’t miss the Eugene Hotel sign atop what was then, at seven stories, the tallest building in town.
Current retirement community staff say the hotel’s manifestation can be traced to UO sports.
Local business leaders thought it “disgraceful” the city didn’t have a classy hotel large enough to accommodate “well-heeled, out-of-town visitors” for football games at Kincaid Field until the construction of Hayward Field in 1919.
In 1916, Harrisburg cattleman Bird Rose, an avid sports fan and business leader, convinced 10 fellow businessmen to invest $10,000 each (about $293,000 today) to buy land on the southeast corner of what was then East Ninth Avenue and Pearl Street. (Ninth Avenue was renamed Broadway in 1927.)
Rose became president of the hotel corporation.
Total cost of the project exceeded $500,000 (about $9.1 million today), the Guard reported. The Morning Register reported the furniture — black walnut in the 183 rooms with private telephone service and solid mahogany in the lobby — cost about $105,000 ($1.9 million today).
About 330 diners celebrated the grand opening, with orchestra music, vaudeville acts and dancing.
The dinner menu included canape of Russian caviar, filet of royal chinook salmon, ravigotte pommes gofrette, milk-fed spring chicken, eastern prime ribs of beef and snow-whipped potatoes.
The “genial ‘Andy’ Anderson,” oversaw the front desk and was already known up and down the coast for his work in Portland and for “his jolly manners.”
The bellboys were all “nice young men, fast and snappy.”
Feeling the heat
The hotel’s heyday was arguably the 1950s, according to newspaper clippings of the time, as well as what retirement community staff have collected in two large binders.
Paul Lansdowne managed the hotel for 18 years, and was promoted to general manager in 1952.
He was just 27, a UO graduate from Gresham who went on to get a master’s degree in hotel management from Cornell University in 1950.
Portland brothers Chester and Alvin Gunderson — of Gunderson Brothers Engineering Corp., builders of ships, bridges and railcars — owned the hotel.
Lansdowne led a series of renovations, including a remodel of the popular Bib’n Tucker restaurant in the Crystal Room in 1953.
The renovations included deep red carpets, pleated red drapes, marble and brick pillars and a gold-and-black Formica top in the bar, the R-G reported. There were also upholstered bench-type booths and shaded lights, with each shade perforated to give the effect of stars on the ceiling.
Much larger changes were coming later in the decade, as well as some well-known faces in American politics, but before that, the hotel had to deal with what happened on April 8, 1956.
“Eugene Hotel Blaze Routs 200 Guests,” was the R-G headline after fire raced through the sixth floor hallway just after 3 a.m. that Sunday.
Someone tossed a still-hot cigarette between mattresses stacked in the hallway. Thick black smoke trapped people in their rooms with some hanging their heads out windows.
Five guests were treated for smoke inhalation at the hospital.
The damage was about $15,000.
Famous names and fancy ballrooms
Five months after the fire, another fervor engulfed the hotel: Vice President Richard Nixon, his Secret Service agents and the rest of his entourage, in town campaigning for a second term for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The 43-year-old Nixon spoke in front of 7,200 at the UO’s McArthur Court, Sept. 19, 1956.
He and wife Pat Nixon returned to their room on the seventh floor, then Room 729, the hotel’s “Presidential Suite,” where Lansdowne and crew decorated with signs only the future president would understand, a mechanical elephant with his daughters’ names painted on it and a souvenir ashtray with an image of the Nixons’ dog, cocker spaniel Checkers, on it, according to a column by the Oregon Journal’s Dick Fagan.
Dec. 30, 1957, the hotel held a gala dedication to raise money for improvements, including two ballrooms — the King Cole and the Village Green — added atop one another in a new annex on the southeast side of the building.
Those spaces are no longer part of the retirement community space, belonging now to Tensegrity Physical Therapy, which leases space on the building’s main floor.
But back in the day, the King Cole Room, named for longtime hotel employee Fred “Doc” Cole, became the scene of many events with its capacity of 500.
There’s no evidence that 74-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt — also in town to speak at Mac Court — used either ballroom during her stay March 5, 1959, but she was quite grateful for the hospitality, according to a letter she wrote to Lansdowne:
“How wonderful you were to send me the lovely flowers, the fruit, and the cheese,” the former first lady wrote. “All of these things contributed to my comfort and enjoyment at the Eugene Hotel and I want to tell you how deeply I appreciate your kind welcome.”
The future presidents
The 1960s were filled with celebrity sightings at the hotel. Hollywood sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, in town to promote the first Northwest Natural Gas pipeline to town, was famously interviewed by nine male members of the R-G newsroom in 1960. The aforementioned Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, was in town for a week of lectures at the UO in 1962. New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller tested the political waters in October 1963 before seeking the Republican nomination for president.
How about this for a leading man trifecta in the summer of 1966? Kirk Douglas, Mitchum — who’d been to Eugene before when he filmed “Rachel and the Stranger” around Spencer Butte in 1947 — and Richard Widmark, in town to film 1967’s “The Way West” at the Vik Construction-built set 10 miles north of Eugene.
Nixon returned in 1967, doing his own testing of the political winds, on his way to announcing his bid for the Republican nomination that led to his 1968 election victory.
Ronald Reagan, just a month into his first term as California governor, stayed at the hotel Feb. 11, 1967, after addressing a crowd of Republicans at the Lane County Fairgrounds and hosting a Sunday morning brunch at the hotel the following morning.
1968 would bring another famous face: Robert F. Kennedy. The former U.S. attorney general and brother of assassinated president John F. Kennedy was running for the Democratic presidential nomination and rode in a May 18 motorcade from the train depot, down Willamette Street, to Hayward Field for a speech in front of about 6,500, according to the R-G, stopping for a “Snoopy Sundae” at Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor at East 13th Avenue and Pearl Street.
He slept at the hotel that night, before heading to California, where he was assassinated two and a half weeks later, June 5, 1968.
Belushi and the blues
November 1969 brought an unexpected visit to the hotel by the cast and crew of “Five Easy Pieces”, which would be nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor for Jack Nicholson.
If you know anything about that movie, it’s probably the famous diner scene filmed at Denny’s on Interstate 5 in Glenwood, the one where Nicholson orders a chicken-salad sandwich he never wanted and, well, never got.
The crew pulled off I-5 into the Denny’s parking lot on Thanksgiving Day on a whim, according to longtime Eugene casting director Katherine Wilson’s 2018 book, “Echoes from the Set.”
After, they were told one of the only places to get Thanksgiving Dinner in Eugene on short notice was the Eugene Hotel. They ended up staying for five days, Wilson told me.
Nicholson would be back in town just a few months later, directing his first film, “Drive, He Said,” a sports comedy-drama with basketball scenes filmed at Mac Court. That’s when Wilson, then a UO freshman, said she first met him.
Oregon was a hotbed of student protests; Nicholson and cinematographer Bill Butler ran over and filmed the National Guard tear-gassing students, Wilson said. Police wanted the footage and located Nicholson in his room at the hotel.
“And he answered naked — ‘Search me,’” said Wilson, who would later work on the crew of Nicholson’s first Oscar win, 1975’s best-picture winner, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, filmed at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.
“So the hotel has been infamous,” said Wilson, who was involved with perhaps the Eugene Hotel’s most famous anecdote, which brings us back to that opening “Blues Brothers” reference.
In October 1977, “Saturday Night Live” star Belushi was in Eugene filming the comedy, “Animal House”.
Although Belushi told R-G arts and entertainment reporter Fred Crafts in 1979 he wandered down to the hotel’s lounge from his rental house in south Eugene one night, when he first met Eugene musician Curtis Salgado, Wilson remembers it another way, or maybe it was another night that month.
After filming the “toga party” scene in the basement of the Sigma Nu fraternity house on East 11th Avenue, Belushi and some of the crew followed Robert Cray, the future five-time Grammy winner, then a Eugene-based blues guitarist and singer who was part of Otis Day and the Knights in the film, down to the hotel to see his band, the Crayhawks, play.
Wilson remembers Belushi wearing too-tight jeans that were making it difficult for him to hop on stage.
“So I pushed him up!” Wilson recalled with a laugh.
Whether it was that night or another, Belushi and Salgado sang “Hey, Bartender,” the famous Floyd Dixon song.
“And the rest is history,” Wilson said.
Belushi and fellow “SNL” cast member Dan Ackroyd debuted their “Blues Brothers” act, later a 1980 movie, on “SNL” on April 22, 1978, with “Hey, Bartender.” A shoutout by future David Letterman band leader Paul Shaffer (as the music producer Don Kirschner) was given to “Curtis Salgado and the Cray Band,” but Salgado never got much else, although Belushi and Ackroyd did dedicate their first album, “Briefcase Full of Blues,” to him.
Still smoking
The Eugene Hotel lost its luster as a place to stay by 1977, having more of a reputation as the annual home of the Eugene Blues Festival.
The hotel’s days were numbered. Chester Gunderson sold it in 1973, a year after his brother’s death. It later became the Eugene Quality Inn under new ownership in early 1980 but was shut down before the end of the year because it didn’t meet fire safety codes, according to a Nov. 19, 1980, R-G story.
Five months later, Portland firm Brim and Associates, which had a controlling interest in the building, announced it would be converted to senior apartments, according to The Associated Press.
The building also survived another fire, this one on Labor Day in 1994. That fire started on the roof when a wooden deck by the elevator shaft caught fire. It even burned the ‘E’ on hotel sign so it read “EUGENE HOT L” the next day, according to reporting by the R-G’s Eric Mortenson.
Although no smoking was allowed inside or outside the building, inspectors suspected a tossed smoke started the fire, which forced about 75 residents to evacuate and caused an estimated $100,000 in damage.
Farrah Schum sat in her wheelchair inside her fourth-floor apartment.
“I can’t go by myself,” she told Mortenson. “I thought I would sit there and burn.”
Someone burst into her room and wheeled her out.
“It was a bumpy ride down the stairs,” she said.
If you go
What: 100th birthday celebration for the Eugene Hotel building
When: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 14
Where: 222 E. Broadway
With: Emerald Valley Vintage Auto Club cars and music by Paul Biondi and Gus Russell (10-11 a.m.; Skip Jones (11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.); Dorian May Quartet (1:30-3 p.m.) and a 2 p.m. rededication ceremony with Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson and Eugene Chamber of Commerce
