Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 10, 1992 TAG: 9202100166
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE and GEORGE KEGLEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
IF WALLS COULD TALK: LAST ROOMS AT FABLED HOTEL SITE SLIP AWAY
The orange chute down the side of Roanoke's Crystal Tower is carrying away the last traces of an innkeeping legacy that began more than two centuries ago on the same spot.Roaring periodically down the chute is the rubble from the last 42 hotel rooms in what was once the 200-room Ponce de Leon Hotel.
The property has been used for inns, taverns or hotels dating back to 1775 - when Archibald Campbell, whose family may have given its name to Campbell Avenue, ran a hostelry of some kind there.
The last of the Ponce de Leon guest rooms, with fancy tile floors in the bathrooms and marble doorsills that are memories of better times, soon will become office space for two agencies of Total Action Against Poverty.
The rooms on the top two floors were last used as quarters for traveling railroad men and bus drivers who slept over in Roanoke. They stopped coming in 1988, but the hotel rooms remained.
The legacy of the Ponce de Leon was often elegant, sometimes naughty and more than a trifle corny, in the best Roanoke tradition.
Elegant. It once was served by a fancy coach that picked up guests at the railroad station. The Spanish-style lobby was, and is, striking.
Naughty. Not so long ago, the hotel became associated with the services of certain ladies of the night.
Ladies of the night were another Roanoke tradition: In the city's younger days, a poetic mayor defended the ladies of his time as "our soiled doves." Well into the 20th century, even, red lights burned on some porches on Salem Avenue.
Soiled or not, the more modern doves who worked the hotel in the mid-20th century did a brisk business.
The hotel also did business in illegal whiskey, bought from the state's monopoly store but sold illegally by bellboys after the state stores had closed for the day.
"The Ponce," as Roanokers called it, was a nighttime kind of place.
It is a matter of embarrassment now to some reporters and editors - who no longer are young - that some of the commerce of the "soiled doves" could be seen from the newspaper windows across Second Street.
In those days, the newspaper building housed both the Roanoke Times and the World-News, which then were separate newspapers. Most of the looking was done by reporters and editors on the morning Times, however, because they worked at night.
In possible further regard to naughtiness, an inn on the same spot, known as the Trout House, was good to Civil War soldiers, historian William McCauley found. "During the Civil War," he wrote, "no soldier was ever charged for entertainment at the Trout House."
McCauley did not describe the "entertainment."
When developer Richard Hamlett bought the building in 1969, he painted its buff exterior white, and there were cruel jokes about a bordello painted white.
Corny. Consider the naming of the eight-floor hotel that wrapped the corner of Second Street and Campbell Avenue in downtown Roanoke:
The Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon searched in vain for a fountain of youth in Florida more than a century before Europeans came across the salt lick and swamp that is now downtown Roanoke. But in the fine old lobby, the old hotel's tiled "Fountain of Youth" is still well-kept, and goldfish swim there.
And there is the spring in the basement - still running as it did centuries ago - that is the original inspiration for the hotel's name. Trout Run, the spring that raised the vision of the original Spanish Ponce de Leon, is a little down on its luck today, but it is still there in the basement.
There is an ancient wooden fence around it, and the building's management has put a screen over the spring itself to prevent mishaps. There still is a sign there that instructs you not to lean on the fence.
It is there for a good reason. Legend says that a newspaper editor once fell into the spring - an accident perhaps explained by its proximity to the famous Pipe Room, which was as striking a tavern as Roanoke has ever seen.
A friendly, beery place
The Pipe Room was named for the pipes that were left exposed in its ceiling. You felt you had to duck to avoid the pipes, but the draft beer was very cold.
It had a magnificent bar and an atmosphere that was friendly and beery. There were waitresses with names like Myrtle and Gladys.
It has become immortal. Marigay Piersall, the Crystal Tower property manager, said people still ask if there are plans to revive the Pipe Room, which now is locked behind a grim door in the cold basement and used for storage.
Later, there was a lounge on the first floor - where Barbi Benton once sang - but it never had the feel or attracted the affections of drinkers like the Pipe Room did.
The Polynesian Room also bloomed briefly in the basement, but it is remembered today by few.
In simpler journalistic times, the Pipe Room, at or about 11 p.m. on a midweek night, furnished the beer that fired the genius of Roanoke Times editors and reporters as they planned the Sunday paper.
On other days, at earlier hours, they took a break there and drank iced tea. At that time of day, at least, they observed strict, sober decorum.
A stop for famous guests
In those times, a reporter called on Lionel Hampton, in town for a gig, and interviewed him as "the Hamp" lay abed in his underwear in a room at the Ponce.
Back when the elevators needed young women to operate them, there were other notable visitors.
There were Fats Domino, the Harlem Globetrotters, Joe Louis, and "Suicide" Hayes, who used to bring his auto thrill show to Victory Stadium.
Wrestlers used to stay, including the substantial Haystack Calhoun, who once broke his bed simply by sleeping in it. After that, when management learned Haystack was checking in again, it made sure the bed he was going to use was reinforced with cinder blocks.
There was a less famous, and nameless, patron, who frequented the cheap rooms in the hotel annex. He gave dime tips to the bellboys - who later discovered that his heavy suitcase contained a coin collection worth a lot of money.
In the early 1970s, the building, known briefly as the Crystal Tower Motor Hotel, was home for the Roanoke Buckskins, a semi-pro football team that failed to become immortal.
The thing about the Buckskins was that the man who managed them was former major league baseball player Jimmy Piersall - who has achieved some kind of immortality.
He and Marigay Piersall, the building manager, once were married.
And Debbie Reynolds is connected to the recent history of the old building. She married Hamlett, who is Marigay Piersall's brother. Reynolds added considerable value to a Christmas party at the Crystal Tower a few years ago.
Piersall was famous when he came to Roanoke. A centerfielder for the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Senators, the flamboyant and combative Piersall was the subject of a popular movie, "Fear Strikes Out."
Anthony Perkins played Piersall in the movie, and Piersall was unhappy with Hollywood for choosing Perkins. Perkins wasn't macho enough for the role, Piersall felt.
The old ballroom, now a conference room, is known now as the Buckskins Room.
From Roanoke, Piersall went on to a career in broadcasting that was never placid, and he still is in a baseball job with the Chicago Cubs.
Fatal fire inspires bravery
More than 60 years ago, there was another debris chute down the same Second Street side of the first Ponce de Leon Hotel.
It was put there after fire ruined the first hotel. On the terrible night of Dec. 28, 1930, reporters looked out the windows of the newspaper building and watched the hotel burn.
The Roanoke Times' coverage of the fire had a nightmare quality to it. Women screamed from upper floors and firemen rescued them on ladders.
Rescue personnel ran around yelling "Gangway! Gangway! Gangway!"
Firemen held nets and risked their lives on upper floors looking for victims.
Many of the guests, the headlines and stories said several times, were "scantily clad."
There was gallantry reported by the Times in classical language: "J.J. Skidmore, an old gentleman 80 years of age, was aided in reaching terra firma by J.T. Haight of New York."
There were tales of escapes but only one death. William S. Trace, 72, a retired railroad timekeeper, longtime resident of room 411, died in the fire.
Trace had lived in the same place before the Ponce de Leon was built. He had been a roomer before the turn of the century at the old Trout House, on the same site.
A Times editorial writer wrote of a "grim, ironic jest of fate" in Trace's death.
With a suggestion of elitism, the editorialist wrote that although Trace had been a good man, his death in the fire gave him "overnight a prominence among his fellow citizens which years of quiet, orderly living had not brought him."
Trace probably would have preferred the quiet, orderly life to the sudden, non-durable fame attached to dying in an extraordinary fire.
The first hotel had been of white brick. It was five stories and looked very elegant in a photo taken in 1886, six years after it opened. When the older hotel burned in 1930, the building that would become the Crystal Tower was built on the same ground, opening in the spring of 1932.
In 1969, when Hamlett bought the last Ponce de Leon and changed its name to the Crystal Tower, he explained the name change by saying that "the Ponce name had declined."
The new name came from a proposed high-rise building that Hamlett wanted to build in South Roanoke near Crystal Spring on Jefferson Street.
Maybe the Ponce name wasn't what it used to be, and maybe its reputation was not so good in the final years.
No matter. Property manager Marigay Piersall said a recent caller stunned her secretary by asking for a hotel reservation - in a building that has been largely office space for decades.
ERAS OF INNKEEPING\ PONCE de LEON HOTEL, ITS PREDECESSORS AND SUCCESSORS
\ 1775: Archibald Campbell opens an inn just off what is now Second Street in what is now downtown Roanoke.
\ 1797: William Stover buys the property and puts up a stone building that is used both as an inn and a home.
\ 1838: John Trout buys the property, enlarges the original building and opens the Trout House. It has 12 rooms, a large inn for that time.
\ 1884: Charles G. Smith leases the Trout House in the year Roanoke becomes a city. He adds a frame wing and changes the name to the Commercial Hotel.
\ 1889: Smith buys the property, tears down the old Trout House and builds the first Ponce de Leon Hotel. It has five stories and opens formally on New Year's Day 1891.
\ 1930: After prospering under several owners, the old hotel is gutted by fire on the night of Dec. 28. One longtime guest, William S. Trace, a retired railroad timekeeper, dies in the fire.
\ 1932: The last of the "Ponces," now the Crystal Tower office building, opens in April, its construction financed by insurance proceeds and owners' money.
\ 1969: Developer Richard Hamlett buys the hotel. For a short time, it will be known as the Crystal Tower Motor Hotel, but it is soon almost solely an office building.
\ 1990: Total Action Against Poverty buys the Crystal Tower, after fire destroys TAP's original building on Shenandoah Avenue.
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