In the old days, the bands used to play under the sun and moon on the marble-floored Beach Walk, which went practically to the lake. They were connected by a passagio that was lined with fancy shops. The 18-story tower had 600 rooms and opened in 1924. The first, shaped like an X, had eight floors and 400 rooms and opened in 1916.
When Marshall and his partner Charles Fox set out to persuade the tony Edgewater neighborhood to accept a hotel, they described it in the most wonderful terms, as a Blackstone on the sea. The hotel had a thousand rooms and was designed by Benjamin Marshall, who also designed the Drake and the South Shore Country Club. When Samantha and Darrin Stevens, of TV’s Bewitched, attended a convention in Chicago, their room was at the Edgewater. You might say Eloise of the Plaza in New York stayed at the Edgewater, too. You might say Roy Hobbs of the New York Knights in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural was shot there. That day in ’32 when Babe Ruth hit a home run to a spot he may or may not have pointed to in Wrigley Field, he’d been ticked off, they say, by someone spitting at his wife at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Xavier Cugat–and what a night that was when his wife broke down the door to confront the bandleader in his quarters with lead singer Abbe Lane. They were all there, from Jeanette MacDonald to Johnny Weissmuller to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In its time, everyone stayed there and everyone danced on the glorious Beach Walk of the Edgewater Beach Hotel. We sat in the back of his black Thunderbird while he took home movies of the wrecking ball crashing into the pink stucco structure.
I don’t remember the place, but I do remember my dad driving us by in 1970 to watch it being demolished. They wanted to dance on the Beach Walk, but the 17-year cicadas were swarming, so they had to stay indoors in the Marine Dining Room. My Aunt Faye and Uncle Harry had their high school prom there.
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