The Plaza Hotel, formerly the Hilton Hotel, is a landmark

skyscraper A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Modern sources currently define skyscrapers as being at least or in height, though there is no universally accepted definition. Skyscrapers are very tall high-ri ...

located at 106 Mills Avenue in

El Paso, Texas El Paso (; "the pass") is a city in and the seat of El Paso County in the western corner of the U.S. state of Texas. The 2020 population of the city from the U.S. Census Bureau was 678,815, making it the 23rd-largest city in the U.S., the ...

, USA.

History

The hotel was constructed on the site of the Sheldon Hotel, which burned down on April 9, 1929. The Sheldon served as the unofficial headquarters for many of the participants in the

Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution ( es, Revolución Mexicana) was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from approximately 1910 to 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It resulted in the destruction ...

(1910-1920s) from both sides of the border. In the fall of 1929,

Conrad Hilton Conrad Nicholson Hilton Sr. (December 25, 1887 – January 3, 1979) was an American businessman who founded the Hilton Hotels chain. From 1912 to 1916 Hilton was a Republican representative in the first New Mexico Legislature, but became disi ...

began construction. Nineteen days later the stock market crashed and the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

began, yet construction continued. On November 30, 1930, the Hilton Hotel opened. At 239 feet (73 m) it surpassed the O. T. Bassett Tower to become the tallest building in El Paso; it is still the city's fifth tallest building. Designed by

Trost & Trost Trost & Trost Architects & Engineers, often known as Trost & Trost, was an architecture firm based in El Paso, Texas. The firm's chief designer was Henry Charles Trost, who was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1860. Trost moved from Chicago to Tucson, ...

, the hotel is an

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...

styled 19-story reinforced cast-in-place concrete structure with setbacks at the 16th and 17th floors. It is faced with brown

brick A brick is a type of block used to build walls, pavements and other elements in masonry construction. Properly, the term ''brick'' denotes a block composed of dried clay, but is now also used informally to denote other chemically cured cons ...

and

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most wid ...

and crowned with a Ludowici clay tile pyramidal roof. The exterior remains largely unaltered from its original form. Conrad Hilton lived in the hotel for many years, as did his mother.

Elizabeth Taylor Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) was a British-American actress. She began her career as a child actress in the early 1940s and was one of the most popular stars of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1950s. ...

, at the time married to Conrad’s son,

Nicky Hilton Nicholai Olivia Rothschild ( Hilton, October 5, 1983) is an American socialite, fashion designer and model. She is a member of the Hilton family by birth, and a member of the Rothschild family through her marriage to James Rothschild, a grandso ...

, lived in the penthouse in 1955 while filming the classic movie Giant (1956). Hilton sold the hotel in 1963, and it was renamed the Plaza Hotel. The hotel closed in 1991. In 2008, El Paso businessman Paul Foster purchased the property. In 2019 it was renovated at a cost of $78 million. The architecture firm for this renovation was

Cooper Carry Cooper Carry is a U.S.-based design firm providing architecture, planning, landscape architecture, interior design and environmental graphic design. The company is based in Atlanta with offices in Alexandria, Virginia; New York City; and (Newport B ...

. It reopened in June 2020 as The Plaza Hotel Pioneer Park.

Historical markers

Historical markers located on the Plaza Hotel include the First Kindergarten in Texas and The Woman’s Club of El Paso. Historical markers located in the vicinity of the hotel include

Chinatown A Chinatown () is an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Aust ...

and the Anson Mills Building. Both markers are located across Mills Avenue at El Paso Street.

About the hotel

The Plaza hotel has 130 rooms with an adjacent car parking garage.

Gallery

Plaza Hotel El Paso.jpg, Northeast side of building

References

External links