Goldfield Hotel

One caretaker held the keys to this building for thirty years and let people in herself.

The Goldfield Hotel stands four storeys at the southeast corner of Crook Avenue and Columbia Avenue in Goldfield, Esmeralda County, Nevada. Reno architects Morrill J. Curtis and George E. Holesworth designed it in the Classical Revival style, and it went up between 1907 and 1908 on the site of two earlier hotels of the same name that had burned down. It was built in a U-shape so that every guest room got an outside window: the main facade runs 180 feet along Columbia, with north and south wings of 100 feet each. The ground floor outside is grey granite from Rocklin, California, the upper storeys redbrick, and a white cornice crowns the top.

It cost between 300,000 and 400,000 dollars and was reported the most spectacular hotel in Nevada when it finished. There were carpets and private baths, a lobby trimmed in mahogany with black leather upholstery and gilded columns, an elevator and crystal chandeliers. It ran as a hotel until the end of the Second World War, its last guests officers and families from the Tonopah Army Air Field, and it has stood empty ever since.

The attempts to revive it read as a list. A California developer, Lester O'Shea, spent 4 million dollars in the 1980s trying to make it an Edwardian tourist retreat and went bankrupt. Edgar S. Roberts, a Carson City rancher and engineer, bought it at the 2003 Goldfield Days auction for about 360,000 dollars, told The Wall Street Journal he might regret it, and by 2010 the work was still unfinished. Virginia Ridgway spent three decades as caretaker and keeper of the keys, letting visitors in and walking them through the floors, until she handed the keys to Malek DaVarpanah in January 2016.

Goldfield itself was founded in 1902 and held 30,000 people in its 1906 boom year, producing 11 million dollars in gold. Few mining towns have this many original buildings in good repair.