Edgewater Beach Hotel
Life Span: Edgewater Beach Hotel-1915-1970
Edgewater Beach Annex-1923-Present
Location: 5345 Sheridan rd, Balmoral avenue and Sheridan road
Architect: Marshall & Fox
Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1915
The proposed Edgewater Beach hotel at Balmoral avenue and Sheridan road in connection with the construction of which two trust deeds were recorded during the week securing loans aggregating $728,500, payable serially at 6 per cent, will be, it is claimed, one of the most artistic as well as novel hotel structures in the country. Designed by Marshall & Fox, both of whom are officers of the Edgewater Beach Hotel company, which owns the property, it will be, it is stated, a sort of seaside annex to the Blackstone, with which it will be closely related. Not only will a motor bus line run between the two but there also will be a sort of marine garage where guests can keep motor boats and a boat line will run to the city.
The hotel will be nine stories high, in the form of a Greek cross, without an inside court. and without an inside room. Every apartment will overlook the lake or Sheridan road, or one of the private parks. A noteworthy feature will be the marine café, on the east front, overlooking the, lake and within ten yards of the water. It will be Chicago’s first public café overlooking the water. Other features will be the sleeping porches and roof garden. It is expected to be ready for guests early next summer. Following the execution of the trust deeds Corbet and Connery made formal transfer of the property to the hotel company of which Mr. Marshall is president and Mr. Fox secretary.
- Edgewater Beach Hotel
About 1915
- The elegant dining room, which seated 1,200, had a strict dress code. You might run into such stars as Bette Davis, Babe Ruth, Tallulah Bankhead, or Nat King Cole here.
Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1923
Looking south over the grounds of the Saddle and Cycle club and about 177 feet distant from the Edgewater Beach hotel will be the $3,000,000 annex, or unit No. 2 of a group of several additions contemplated. Marshall & Fox are architects. The annex will be connected with the present hotel by a “passagio ” (the spelling is guaranteed by the architects, so we’ll have no “Beg Your Pardon” if you please). The present outdoor dancing space will be considerably enlarged. Six inches of clay and six inches of black earth will cover the roof of the underground garage, just east of the “passagio,” told about more fully in a nearby column. There’ll be a broadcasting station in the tower of the annex. The building will be about 380 feet long and will average sixty feet in width. George A. Beesley will be in charge of construction for the Edgewater Beach Hotel company.
Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1923
SUBWAY GARAGE FOR EDGEWATER BEACH ADDITION
Work Starts on 3 Million 425 Room Annex.
Excavating has begun for the $3,000,- 000 unit No. 2 of the Edgewater Beach hotel group, just south of the present bostelry. It will add 425 sleeping rooms to the present hotel’s 432, giving the two units a combined room capacity of 857, making it one of the largest of the outlying hotels. Marshall & Fox, who designed the original Edgewater Beach, are the architects.
An unusual feature, and one which it is claimed has never been tried betore, is the underground garage, to be built beneath the garden, stretching between the two hotel units. It will care for 150 cars of guests. Entrance will be through a tunnel running under the new annex and opening into Berwyn avenue, which has been cut through from Sheridan road to the lake.
The new hotel will be somewhat different in shape from the original structure, built in 1916, but will harmonize architecturally with it, being of the same materials, stucco on tile, with red roof and tower. The latter will be lighted with a much more elaborate colored flood lighting system than is the cupola on the present hotel.
There’ll be a banquet hall, a new ballroom, double the size of the present one, private dining rooms and committee rooms in the annex. There will be no restaurant; instead, the present hotel café will be enlarged to care for the additional guests. A coffee shop is planned, however, and on the Sheridan road frontage will be ten stores. It will be completed about Jan. 1.
- Edgewater Beach Hotel and Annex
1928
- In the early 1950s, Lake Shore Drive was extended north from Foster Avenue to Hollywood Avenue. Road engineers hastened the demise of the hotel when they separated the hotel from its namesake beach with a lot of landfill and pavement. When the project was completed, the Edgewater Beach Hotel’s guests had to walk under the highway to get to the beach.
Chicago Tribune, December 22, 1967
EDGEWATER BEACH CLOSES
Hotel Broke, Files in Bankruptcy
The Edgewater Beach hotel, a north side landmark for half a century, closed its door yesterday.
Malcolm M. Gaynor, attorney who on Tuesday was named in federal District court to represent the interests of the hotel owners in bankruptcy proceedings, said 65 permanent guests were told to move.
Mortgages Can’t Help
“The decision to close is based on facts and figures that have come into our possession since the court date (Dec. 19). We asked questions and the answers we got left us no choice as to what we could do,” he said.
“In the effort to stay open we went to the three principal mortgage holders and informed them we couldn’t operate the Malcolm Gaynor hotel unless they helped out. They couldn’t, so there was no choice.”
Representatives of o ther hotels were at the Edgewater Beach yesterday interviewing some of its 300 employes for new jobs at the other hotels. Gaynor said the employes’ situation was “a sad plight -being without a job at Christmas.”
Payless Pay Day
Today would be a pay day for the employes, but Gaynor said there is “no telling when they will be paid” for work done for the hotel prior to the filing in bankruptcy Tuesday.
Gaynor said that in going over the books and records of the hotel Wednesday night he discovered there were not enough funds on hand to pay employes. “The hotel had been operating at such a tremendous loss that we were just not able to stay in business,” he said.
General Manager Herb Kruger said that the Christmas season is traditionally a slow season for hotels and that “if we could have gotten thru the slow Christmas period I think we could have hung on.”
“We were making a lot of economies and plugging a lot of leaks,” he said.
The hotel is owned by the H. R. Weissberg corporation, which also owns other hotels in Florida and Baltimore.
Early this year the corporation agreed to a $445,000 settlement in a suit by employes of the hotel charging that company officials misappropriated $307,000 from employe pension funds. The hotel had been in economic difficulty for several years. It abandoned its traditional “carriage trade” role several years ago and made a bid to win a share of the city’s convention business in an effort to improve its standing.
In 1964 it restored and reopened its famous Marine room, which for more than 30 years had been the place to go for high school and college proms and other festive occasions.
The hotel, on the lake front at 5345 Sheridan rd., was built in 1916 with 400 rooms. When a 600-room addition was completed and put into use in 1926, the investment was estimated at 9 million dollars.
Besides its Marine room it was famous for many years for its board walk on Lake Michigan.
Chicago Tribune, December 10, 1969
Edgewater Beach Hotel
YULE BUYERS CARRY OFF OLD MEMORIES
By Michael Kilian
One of the busiest places for Christmas shopping yesterday was an old building at 5349 Sheridan rd.—the Edgewater Beach hotel.
On sale, piece by piece and doorknob by doorknob, was the hotel itself, which was once the most luxurious on the city’s north side.
After the city filled in the lakefront and moved its beach to the other side of Lake Shore drive, the hotel fell on hard times. It will fall on even harder ones three weeks from now when wreckers from the Boyas Excavating company begin tearing it down.
Noting the hotel’s sentimental value, the Boyas people decided to open the doors to the public in the interim, in the event someone wanted to purchase a souvenir. Yesterday, several hundred responded, snatching up bed frames, mirrors, and even the hotel’s old soda fountain.
According to Wayne Bratz, Boyas general manager, the most popular item seemed to be doorknobs, which were selling rapidly at $2 a set.
Also going well was yesterday’s “special,” air conditioners selling for $45 each; table lamps, for $15 apiece; and folding tables for $10.
The hotel’s collection of nonfunctioning 15-year-old television sets was moving rather slowly, but one man bought up all of the Edgewater’s used bell hop uniforms and another bought for $50 the building’s 250 horsepower air conditioning motor to use for a snowmaking machine at his Indiana ski resort.
The sale will continue, from 8 a. m. to 4 p. m. Monday thru Friday until Dec. 19, and Bratz thinks everything will be sold by then, perhaps even some of the old television sets. Asked if he didn’t think doorknobs made peculiar Christmas gifts, Bratz turned to sell a woman seven sets of them and said: “Of course not. Some people are even buying entire doors.”
Chicago Sun-Times, October 28, 2025
Edgewater landmark to look even prettier in pink, thanks to a new paint job
It’s taken 500 gallons of the paint color “sunset pink” to cover the southeast wing of the 97-year-old co-op, one of Chicago’s most visible buildings.
For the first time in 25 years, the Edgewater Beach Apartments is getting put back in the pink as crews of painters refresh the 20-story Spanish Revival landmark’s legendary color.
Workers have been repainting the southeast wing of the 97-year-old co-op, 5555 N. Sheridan Road, since April and will tackle the other three wings between the spring and fall of 2026.
For now, the building presents an interesting visual contrast with the color-faded wings juxtaposed against the one with a fresh coat of “sunset pink,” the color originally selected by Marshall & Fox, the architecture firm that designed the building.
“It makes the old coating look almost brown [in comparison],” Edgewater Beach Apartments Corp. President Joseph D. Ferrario said. “It’s just so dazzling.”
- The Edgewater Beach Apartments, 5555 N. Sheridan Road, is getting repainted.Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
A resort in the city
A city landmark that’s also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Edgewater Beach Apartments and its distinctive color and Maltese Cross-like floor plan have been a presence on the north lakefront since 1928.
The brick-and-stucco building and its larger Spanish Revival companion, the late, great Edgewater Beach Hotel — painted in “sunrise yellow” — formed a Great Gatsby-style playland on the city’s lakefront.
During the swank hotel’s heyday, guests included celebrities such as Nat King Cole, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead and Babe Ruth. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there in 1963.
Those who wanted a more permanent stay could take up residence in the Edgewater Beach Apartments and enjoy the buildings’ private lakeside beach, or tune in to dance music on its radio station WEBH.
“The hotel [and apartments were] always touted as this resort in the city with services,” said John Zukowsky, who, along with historian Jean Guarino, wrote the 2016 book Benjamin H. Marshall: Chicago Architect.
“You’d have a shuttle bus that would take people to different locations, like the railroad station. But also to stores like Marshall Fields downtown — and then it also had its own seaplane,” Zukowsky said.
“It was designed as a lifestyle building; that is people could live here as if they were on vacation,” resident Nancy Ferrario said. Ferrario is one of the building’s architecture docents and lives there with her husband, Joseph.
Marshall & Fox’s major work includes the Drake Hotel, South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Drive, and the Blackstone Hotel, 636 S. Michigan Ave.
The Edgewater Beach Hotel’s fortunes waned after losing its private beach when DuSable Lake Shore Drive was extended north in the 1950s, and a public park was placed on the east edge of the complex.
The hotel went bankrupt in 1967 and was demolished in 1971. But the magnificent apartment building, visible from DuSable Lake Shore Drive, survived—pink paint and all.
A repaint and more
It took more than 500 gallons of sunset pink to cover the southeast wing, Joseph Ferrario said.
And depending on weather, or what’s being painted, it has taken between four to 16 workers to do the job.
Where does one find sunset pink paint? Luckily, the project’s consultants were able to create a new batch by matching it to the color found in a can of historically-correct paint left in the building’s basement from a 1999 repainting.
“The engineers actually did some archaeology on the building and ascertained that this is indeed the 1928 color,” Ferrario said.
The new paint has a measure of elasticity that will allow it to better stand up against expansion and contraction cycles caused by Chicago’s weather.
Work also includes repairing exterior walls and roof structures, as well as the building’s iconic flagged-topped copula, Ferrario said.
This year’s work is expected to wrap up next month, he said.
“This is a pretty substantial project for us, but it’s something that needs to be done,” Ferrario said. “A shareholder said, ‘Oh, we just did this.’ But it’s been 25 years, and the expected life of what we’re doing now: 25 years.”
- Edgewater Beach Annex
Photo by T. Gregory, October 5, 2026
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