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Hotel Cortez, corner of Mills and Mesa Streets, 1956.
Image provided by the
El Paso County Historical Society
Collections
The
Cortez Building
El Paso, Texas
The
Cortez Building is located on the northeast corner of North Mesa and
Mills Avenue on San Jacinto Plaza in downtown El Paso. For more than
seventy-five years it has served the city as a hotel, office building,
and home to government agencies. It was originally built as a hotel on
the plaza, the last of three hotels to occupy that site. In 1899, Mrs.
Alzina DeGroff, a pioneer in the hotel business in El Paso, acquired the
Vendome Hotel and renamed it the Hotel Orndorff after her first husband.
She operated it for more than twenty-five years until 1924 when she
borrowed 825,000 dollars and hired the renowned El Paso architectural
firm Trost and Trost to design a new hotel. The Hotel Orndorff was
demolished and a new Orndorff Hotel was constructed at the same site at
a cost of more than 1.4 million dollars. Henry C. Trost, who dominated
the architectural scene of the American Southwest for more than three
decades, designed the building.[1]
Unfortunately, Mrs. DeGroff did not live to see the completion of the
building and in 1927 it was sold to the Hussmann Hotel Company and
became the Hotel Hussman. The company spent almost 700,000 dollars
expanding the hotel. Three hundred rooms, a major convention hall, and
dining facility were added. When completed, this was the largest hotel
between Dallas and Los Angeles. In 1935 a contest was held to re-name
the building. The winning entry suggested that it honor Spanish
conquistador Hernando Cortez, so the name was changed to the Hotel
Cortez.[2]
The eleven-storey building has twelve bays facing Mesa and ten facing
Mills. The entrance on Mesa Street has a five-storey cast relief portal
and ornamented windows on the sixth and seventh levels. It is in the
tradition of the Spanish Colonial Revival which was popular in the
1920s, a blending of renaissance, Moorish, and Baroque styles featuring
many refernces to the Spanish and Spanish-American past. The interior
features wrought iron, glazed tiles, and wooden beams, many with
hand-painted designs. In A Castle of Old Spain on the Plaza of El
Paso, a booklet celebrating the hotel that was published shortly
after its renovation in 1928 it was compared to a "Spanish nobleman's
mansion." The exterior of the building features portrait heads of
conquistadors on the front entrance.[3]
For the next thirty-five years the Hotel Cortez was a
well-known landmark on the plaza drawing visitors and celebreties from
around the world. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy stayed at the
Cortez during his visit to El Paso. The Hotel Cortez finally closed its
doors in February 1970 after forty-four years of operation. Mexican
businessman Jorge Murra of Torreon purchased the building and leased the
space to various government agencies. In the process, he gutted much of
the interior. A major fire damaged the structure further in 1972.[4]
In the early 1980s the building was sold once again and underwent major
renovations. The first and tenth floor were restored to their original
splendor. The other floors were remodeled as professional offices. The
El Paso Community Foundation, located on the tenth floor of the
structure, has further restored the building. Today, the Cortez Building
remains a splendid "castle" overlooking San Jacinto Plaza in downtown El
Paso.[5]
[1] El Paso
(TX) Herald-Post, Aug. 30, 1946; Jan. 1, 1936; El Paso (TX)
Times, Oct. 20, 1935.
[2] El Paso
Herald-Post, Oct. 26, 1935.
[3] Lloyd C.
and June-Marie Engelbrecht, Henry C. Trost: Architect of the
Southwest (El Paso, TX 1981), 72; Norman Walker, A Castle of
Old Spain on the Plaza of El Paso (El Paso, TX 1926), 3.
[4] El Paso
Herald-Post, May 30, 1977; May 4, 1978.
[5] El Paso
Community Foundation, "Downtown Historic Walking Tour: El Paso," (El
Paso, TX 2000); El Paso Herald-Post, May 30, 1977; El Paso
Times, July 15, 1978; Feb. 23, 1980.
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