Special Installment

Reprinted from the Telluride Times, July 21, 1967

‘It ended the night Colorado went dry’: The story of the New Sheridan Hotel from the book, ‘No More Than Five in a Bed: Colorado Hotels in the Old Days,’ by Sandra Dallas

Theodore Roosevelt, Colorado’s favorite visiting dignitary, never made it as far as the New Sheridan in Telluride, but the fancy-fine hotel gave a hell of a good welcome to another equally astute political traveler, William Jennings Bryan. During one of the silver-tongued orator’s perennial political campaigns, Telluride’s civic leaders built a fine wooden platform in front of the New Sheridan, decorated with red, white and blue banners and American flags, so the popular politician could address the crowds.

The New Sheridan was only a few years old when it was chosen as Bryan’s backdrop in 1903. As the orator could attest, it was one of the finest hostelries in the state that backed him solidly every time he ran for president.

Gus Brickson and Max Hippler, a Swede and a German, built the two-story New Sheridan, probably named after the Sheridan Mine, in 1895 and added a third story a few years later. The Sheridan wasn’t much to look at from the street but made up for lack of exterior luster with a plush job of finishing inside. The lobby was a sprightly little room decorated with rich paneling and the finest collection of ore specimens outside the state capitol in Denver. A huge sofa was built into one wall and above it was a library shelf for guests’ use.

Directly behind the lobby was the mirror-lined American Room, the hotel dining room and sometime ballroom. High in a corner was a tiny brass-railed balcony which opened into the dining room and two rooms on the other side of the hotel. It was used as a musicians’ gallery, and the players reached it by a slim brass stairway against the wall.

The Sheridan was known all over Colorado for its excellent cuisine which, it bragged, was the best in the state outside the Brown Palace. Anything available at the Denver hotel (Colorado establishments like to use the Brown Palace as a point of comparison) could be obtained at the Sheridan — from vichyssoise to fresh strawberries, pork tenderloin and seafood to possum and plank steak — “two inches thick, a foot wide, and ‘mebbe two feet long,’ garnished in greens.” A wine cellar supplied the beverages, and the hotel employed a Japanese cook to turn out pastries.

A street entrance in front of the hotel opened into the Sheridan’s saloon with its calf wallpaper and cherry-wood bar decorated with carved lions’ heads. Made in Austria, the bar had been freighted over the mountains to Telluride. A small area at the rear of the bar, separated from it by cherry paneling and leaded-glass windows, served as a gambling room. Behind it was the room which old-timers remember fondly as the Continental Room, whose purpose varies with each account.

[Up until a few decades ago], the hotel liked to intimate that the room, divided into 16 booths, was the scene of illicit tête-à-têtes. Indeed, the area had its private back entrance, and its booths were once draped with sound-absorbing velvet-plush curtains. Each had its own plug for a telephone, and a special call board summoned a waiter when he was wanted — to prevent his over-solicitous interruptions.

But as scandalous as the Continental Room might have seemed, most old-timers say the idea that a man took his wife to dinner in the American Room, his mistress in the Continental, is nonsense. Whoever said that, declared a former waitress, “certainly did extort the truth. The Sheridan never allowed such goings on, and the waitresses had strict orders to be ladies at all times.” Besides, said another, there were 33 saloons in Telluride and anyone bent on indiscretion might well have taken a lady to one of them without bothering the Sheridan. Within the memory of most, the room always has been a coffee shop.

A simple, straight stairway separating the salon and lobby sides of the hotel led to the second floor and the sleeping rooms. A third floor was added in 1899, when the Denver Times announced, the “New Sheridan is being topped out with a third story, and in 60 days that popular hostelry will throw 20 of 25 new rooms open to transient guests.” The new floor was hooked on the lower ones by the stairway, which just continued its upward slant so that the staircase was a long diagonal run from the front of the first floor directly to the rear of the third.

The hotel had been built with central heating, plumbing and electricity. Several years before the Sheridan was constructed, a local mining magnate named Nunn gave George Westinghouse a reported $50,000 in gold to turn Telluride into the first town in the country lighted with alternating current. Though Westinghouse was long gone when the Sheridan was built, the hotel nevertheless was wired for electricity, probably by a local man.

Built far back in the San Juans, the Sheridan never entertained the troupes of celebrities that flocked to hotels in more accessible towns, but it did have its share of local high society. Bulkeley Wells, a gay blade and mien operator in charge of the Smuggler-Union Mine, was a close friend of Denver’s social arbiter, Mrs. Crawford Hill, and frequently gave parties at the Sheridan for her and her friends. His favorites were costume balls, and to outfit his guest, wells ordered several hundred costumes shipped to Telluride from Chicago especially for the events.

[In 1969] heavy rains deluged the town of Telluride, causing a tremendous mudslide that ran down the mountain behind the Sheridan and flooded the hotel 8 feet high with mud. The slide hit so suddenly that people weren’t prepared for it and one story tells that the muck rushed into the American Room picking up a table as a man sat behind it eating. For days the management of the Sheridan was cleaning mud from its walls and floors and finally had to use horses to scrape the lobby.

Greatly responsible for the New Sheridan’s 20-year success were J.A. and A.W. Segerberg, who owned the hotel for many years. In 1914 they built the opera house next door to the Sheridan, on the site of the Sheridan block, a building which had housed stores, offices, the board of trade and the Telluride Club, until it had burned down a number of years before. Though called an opera house, the new building was more a vaudeville and movie house and dance hall than a legitimate theater. Special doorways were cut into the hotel dining room and lobby that led to the theater entrances, and room 18 on the second floor was converted into a hallway connecting with the theater.

The dance hall-movie house was decorated with cut-glass chandeliers and private boxes surrounded with brass rails land velvet curtains. The screen, a Venetian scene, was painted by J. Ericksen, who also decorated the walls, designed the backdrops, and painted two pictures to be hung in the hotel lobby. The theater floor was flat, and the stage had storage space underneath so that when not used as a theater, the room, with its chairs shoved under the stage, was ideal for dancing.

The opera house had a short run. Like the hotel, it began its decline in the late 1910s.
“The night the state went dry,” remarked one old-timer sadly, referring to the Sheridan, “that was  the end of it.” The Segerbergs lost nearly everything they owned and finally left Telluride, the little they possessed in a single suitcase. The theater was closed in 1925 and didn’t open again for nearly 40 years. The hotel was shut down intermittently.

Much of the New Sheridan had been denuded (a latter-day owner traded its antique furnishings to Knott’s Berry Farm in exchange for sterile, standard hotel furniture). The hotel has since been restored to the grandeur of the time when the town’s civic leaders chose it as Telluride’s finest backdrop for Colorado’s three-time choice as President of the United States.

[When I first visited the Sheridan’s “Continental Room” (now where the pool tables are) in the early 1970s, there were still some booths with privacy curtains. You could still access the stage of the Opera House via the second floor of the hotel, through what was then the laundry room. While doing plays, that’s where the cast waited “in the wings” for their entrances. The laundry room was also a clandestine, but openly acknowledged, place for indulging in “extra-curriculars of all sorts.”]

Bobbie can be contacted at bobbies@telluridecolorado.net. Comments are welcome.