Basin Park Hotel

Built by real estate developer W. M. Duncan, this seven-story hotel replaced a four-story wooden hotel that had burned down, and the use of locally quarried limestone for the walls was intended to avoid its predecessor’s fate. The exterior has a modest Richardsonian Romanesque air due to the rusticated limestone and a ground-floor round-arched arcade supported by limestone piers. The building curves to follow the bend in the street, and its rounded corners, suggestive of turrets, give it a castle-like mountainous aspect. But the rear facade positioned against a steep mountain is perhaps more interesting in the way that it adapts to its site. Each of the rear facade’s seven floors possesses an exit to a “ground level” via a short footbridge to the mountain’s side; thus this is a building where every floor serves as a ground floor. The hotel’s top floor, with windows on three sides, accommodates a ballroom and is an observation point for the mountainous scenery beyond. The Basin Park Hotel takes its name from the adjacent park (CR5) to its south.