The Elton Hotel is located at 30 West Main Street in downtown Waterbury, Connecticut, United States. It is an early 20th-century building by local architects Griggs & Hunt in the Second Renaissance Revival architectural style.
It was built in 1904 to replace a lavish hotel lost in a fire that destroyed much of downtown Waterbury two years earlier. To the surprise of its investors, mainly prominent local businessmen, it turned a profit within a year of its opening. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a guest, and James Thurber is said to have written "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", during a stay of his. On the eve of the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy gave an early-morning speech from the hotel that was credited with helping him win Connecticut. It continued to be used as a hotel until the early 1970s.
In the late 1970s, when the Downtown Waterbury Historic District was created, the hotel building was included as a contributing property. In 1983, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places individually. Since then it has been converted into professional office space and senior housing.
Building
The hotel is located on the north side of West Main, at the east corner with Prospect Street. It occupies a lot of a quarter-acre, about a thousand square feet (). On the opposite corner is Immaculate Conception Church, a Baroque Revival Roman Catholic church built in the late 1920s. To the west, on the corner with North Main Street, is another, smaller office building of similar vintage. Across the street is Waterbury Green, the two-acre () downtown park at the center of the city. The surrounding neighborhood is similar high-density urban mixed-use development, with many other buildings dating to the same period and earlier, reflecting contemporary styles.
The building itself is a 100-foot (30.5 m) square six-story seven-bay steel frame structure surfaced in buff brick. It is topped with a flat roof. The south (front) facade projects slightly; within that the central five bays project as well.
Exterior
On the first story the face is rusticated limestone. Round-arched openings, set with opening casement windows muntined in wooden ogee curves, have scroll keystones with carved acanthus leaves and floral festoons. Below them are small basement windows screened by curved bombe grilles. The main entrance is centrally located in a flat-roofed projecting portico.
A limestone stringcourse sets off the top of the story. The second-story windows have scrolled keystones as well, but over smaller, rectangular openings. They, and all the other window bays on the upper stories, are filled by eight-over-one sash windows, in the outer four bays and recessed French doors in the inner three, opening onto a balcony with wrought iron railing supported in the middle by the entrance portico and on the sides by large scrolled brackets. The brickwork echoes the rustication below and is further quoined at the corners.
Another limestone stringcourse divides the second and third stories. At this level copper-sheathed oriel windows fill the two bays flanking the center and continue for the next two stories. Quoins set them off as well, and the oriels are decorated with corner pilasters, recessed panels below the openings and classical cornices in a different motif on each level: a round pediment and dentils on the third story, straight with small mutules at the fourth, and large mutules and a cartouche on the fifth.
The other windows on the third and fourth stories are set within slightly recessed two-story rounded arches. They are topped with keystones supporting carved stone motifs above their lintels. Those on the third story have swags, with wreaths in the arch on the fourth.
Projecting bricks, interrupted by the quoins and oriels, set off the fifth story. The windows there have less decoration, primarily splayed-brick lintels similar to those on the two stories below but with a projecting keystone. At the top of the oriel is another balcony like the one on the second story, with scrolled brackets supporting it in the center as well. On the sixth floor French doors again open onto the balcony from recessed openings; the outer windows are the plainest on the facade, slightly recessed with a projecting brick surround, divided from each other by recessed panels.
At either upper corner of the panels begins the copper roofline treatment. More large scrolled brackets and mutules support projecting eaves create a cornice effect. Atop them is a pattern in which narrow niches alternate with large copper cartouches. Large stylized foot scrolls support a flagpole in the center.