BY KRIS LEONHARDT
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
GREEN BAY – The Green Bay Press-Gazette announced the name of Green Bay’s newest hotel in its Tuesday, Feb. 20, 1923 edition.
“The company owns the Hotel Wisconsin and the Astor in Milwaukee and is reported to have purchased a site a few feet from the Capitol square in Madison for a million-dollar hotel to be known as the Betlaw. The same concern is completing a hotel at Fond du Lac and is reported to have its eyes on Racine or Kenosha,” the article stated.
The company behind it all was Schroeder Hotels, as developer Walter Schroeder worked to create a chain of fine hotels in the state throughout the 1920s.
While the Schroeder company originally had no designs on the Green Bay area, the need for such a hotel was great and was a source of contention for one local resident.
“C.J. Williams, one of Green Bay’s most progressive real estate and insurance dealers, listened to the complaints for a long time, and then decided that there should be more and better hotel accommodations here,” a Press-Gazette article recalled in March 1924.
Williams went straight to the top of the hotel chain to the president, and given two minutes of the man’s time, was able to garner enough interest for an investigation.
By the time company representatives visited Green Bay, Williams had three sites identified.
Rumors circulated around the city for weeks in late 1922 before the newspaper confirmed that options had been secured on two of those sites; however, the excitement was quickly abated as H.O. Wood, general manager of the Schroeder hotel in Milwaukee, said that the deal was at a stand-still.
“It is true that we have obtained options in Green Bay,” he stated. “However, we consider the prices asked all out of proportion to the value and you can say that we have decided not to exercise our options. The move is dead as far as we are at least for the present.”
The company was in the midst of a million-dollar hotel project in Milwaukee and one in Fond du Lac, and the expense may have seemed too daunting to take on.
The two sites being considered were one at Main and Adams and one on Pine Street between Adams and Jefferson.
However, by December, excavation was being planned for the hotel at Pine and Adams, with land purchased from the Hagemeister estate.
Plans began for a 132-by-159 foot fireproof nine-story hotel with over 225 rooms, designed by prominent Milwaukee architect Herbert Wallace Tullgren, who designed the previous Schroeder hotels.
But the struggles with Green Bay’s new hotel would not go away anytime soon.
Next week: An uphill battle