Once The Stevens Hotel

 

 

By Megan McKinney

 

When it opened on May 2, 1927, the current Hilton Chicago was The Stevens Hotel, named for its developers, James W. Stevens and his son Ernest, who with their family operated the Illinois Life Insurance Company.

 

 

James W. Stevens’ 1260 North Lake Shore Drive residence was—and is—as stunning as his hotel.

 

Even then, Hilton Chicago’s predecessor was immense, the largest hotel in the world with three thousand guest rooms. It also boasted a twenty-seven-chair barber shop, a pharmacy, candy shop, five-lane bowling alley, twelve hundred seat movie theater and, on its roof, was an 18-hole miniature golf course.

 

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Twenty-seven barber chairs—count them

And there were the other—now legendary—public spaces.  

 

 

Normandie Lounge was created with  panels and additional furnishings from  SS Normandie, the great French ocean liner.

 

 

The Boulevard Room, like the Normandie Lounge, survived the decades in an altered form. In this illustration, it retained its initial—but long gone—ice rink.

 

 

The Hilton Chicago International Ballroom is immense; however, it is  the Grand Ballroom, above, with its magnificent gilded and glazed decorative plaster, 24-karat gold leaf covered ornate wall carvings, and many restored murals, that attracts Chicago’s finest social events. For years, when Opening Night of the Lyric Opera of Chicago was at its most spectacular, this was the place to be.

 

 

From December 1949, when the Woman’s Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital launched its annual Passavant Cotillion and Christmas Ball, the Grand Ballroom would never be the same.  A Woman’s Board member and Passavant Cotillion founder was silent film star Colleen Moore, who had married Chicago widower Homer Hargrave, then vice president and director of Merrill Lynch in Chicago.

 

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With her marriage to Chicago’s Homer Hargrave, silent screen star Colleen Moore became step-mother to his two children, Judy and Homer Hargrave, Jr.

 

 

Above  is a sampling of the initial Passavant Cotillion debutantes in December 1949.  Seated in front is Judy Hargrave.  Her brother, Homer Hargrave, Jr., is the third standing escort from the left 

 

 

On the Grand Ballroom dance floor at the 1949 Passavant Cotillion. Judy Hargrave is again in front—at  far left. She went on to become Mrs. R. Jackson Coleman and a member of the Woman’s Board. 

 

 

Judy Hargrave and Joan Peterkin,  at left, were honored as the two Wing Leaders at first Passavant Cotillion. Throughout the year, Judy, Joan, and the other 1949 debutantes were active hospital volunteers.

 

 

Another debutante in the Inaugural Passavant Cotillion  of 1949 was Margaret Mary  Barry—later Mrs. Emmet O’Neill, then Mrs. John G. Conley.  Margaret Mary too would join the sponsoring Woman’s Board.  She is above with her daughter—also Margaret Mary—now Mrs. John L. Stoetzel and  herself a member of The Woman’s Board of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. 

 

Margaret Mary Stoetzel today

 

The first Passavant Cotillion in 1949.

 

And in 1951.

 

Author Photo: Robert F. Carl