This time, it's the Sovereign on SW Madison and Broadway. It was another late afternoon of being entranced by the light moving across building facades while I was out for a walk. I mean, look at this, the lowering sun reflected off the more modern surrounding glass towers:
It's just stunning. I could sense the undulating warmth of the bricks from a block and a half away. I must have stood there agog for a bit too long, because I had not one but two people ask me what I was looking at. When I pointed out the side of the hotel, they each looked up, smiled a bit , and walked away. Of of them shook his head a little and muttered something more or less friendly about an artistic eye.
I'm going to ignore for a moment that the Oregon Historical Society has long had an affiliation with this building, as well as the stunning Richard Haas trompe l'oeil murals on the south side (admittedly, this is mostly because I was so caught up in the light that afternoon that I didn't think to try to photograph them), and follow my own rabbit trails through the wilds of the internet. Because, really, they're fun and sometimes charming.
The earliest documentation I can find on the building is in, of all things, what appears to be a plumber's trade journal, Valve World. Apparently the pipes and ceramics in this for this Carl Linde structure were something to behold in 1923, the year the building was erected. The writeup given the hotel in the journal is interesting for its photos of the exterior (including a shot of the rooftop sign long gone these days) and its glimpses into the apartments therein. Calling the hotel a "goodly place to 'bide a wee'," the writers of the piece focus on, understandably, the fixtures which the tidy little rooms offered: "Seventy-four five-foot Crane "Modus" one-piece enameled iron recessed bath tubs, fitted with concealed combination compression top bell supply and waste fixtures with indexed all-china handles and china escutcheons, built-in china soap holders with drains and grab rods, concealed showers with Crane temperature regulating valves, special pressure control stops, curtain rods, and white duck curtains", etc.
Whew. I've heard of food porn, but bath fixture porn? These descriptions go on for page after loving page. The rooms, by the way, were turned into apartments a little over a decade after the hotel was built, so someone must have liked these fixtures enough to stay a while.
The application to have the Sovereign added to the National Register of Historic Places was submitted in 1980, when the building was under the ownership of Bruce Kegg, who apparently later gained a bit of national fame for renovating a fire station in NW and having the resulting home featured on HGTV. The application notes that the only significant exterior changes between 1923 and 1980 were the addition of an entry on Madison and the removal of both the aforementioned rooftop sign and a glass canopy over the Broadway entrance (which can also be seen in The Valve). It also gives a good amount of attention to the fact that one of the original tenants of the ground floor was a restaurant called Henry Theile's, which seems to have been quite a mid-century landmark after it moved northwest a few blocks to Burnside and 23rd. Theile seems to have come to the Sovereign after being a chef at the Benson, but the later iteration of his restaurant was decidedly family-friendly. In fact, Henry Theile's on Burnside was so popular that many folks taken with nostalgia (and, it seems, memories of time spent with their grandparents) seek out the recipe for its trademark dish, the German pancake.
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