The Peabody Memphis is a luxury hotel in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee. The hotel is known for the Peabody Ducks that live on the hotel rooftop and march daily into the lobby. The hotel is on the National Trust for Historic Places.
The original Peabody Hotel was built in 1869 at the corner of Main and Monroe Streets by Robert Campbell Brinkley, who named it to honor his friend, the recently deceased George Peabody, for his contributions to the South. The hotel was a huge success, and Brinkley gave it to his daughter Anna as a wedding gift. The hotel had 75 rooms with private bathrooms and elegant public rooms. Among its guests were Presidents Andrew Johnson and William McKinley and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, lived there in 1870 when he worked as president of an insurance company. The hotel closed in 1923 in preparation for a move one block away. The building was demolished and Lowenstein's department store was constructed on the site.
The current Peabody Hotel building, on Union Avenue, is an Italian Renaissance structure designed by noted Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager. Construction began less than a month after the old hotel closed. The new hotel was built on the previous site of the Fransioli Hotel, a structure which looked nearly identical to the original Peabody Hotel. The new hotel opened on September 1, 1925.
Before the mid-1960s, alcoholic beverages were sold in Tennessee only as sealed bottles in licensed liquor stores. A patron could bring a bottle acquired elsewhere into the hotel bar where the bartender would tag it and mix drinks from it at the patron's request.
The hotel was sold to the Alsonett Hotel Group in 1953. Deeply in debt by the early 1960s, it went bankrupt in 1965 and was sold in a foreclosure auction to Sheraton Hotels. It became the Sheraton-Peabody Hotel.
As downtown Memphis decayed in the early 1970s, the hotel suffered financially, and the Sheraton-Peabody closed in December 1973. An Alabama investment group purchased the hotel in 1974 and reopened it briefly under its original name, but they declared bankruptcy on April 1, 1975 and it closed again. Isadore Edwin Hanover purchased the hotel from the county on July 31, 1975 for $400,000 and sold it to his son-in-law, Jack A. Belz for the same amount. Belz spent the next several years and $25 million renovating the landmark structure. The grand reopening in 1981 is widely considered a major catalyst for the Memphis downtown area's ongoing revitalization.
The Peabody Hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
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