Coates House Hotel

The Coates House Hotel is a former hotel at 1005 Broadway in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, on the National Register of Historic Places. Also known as the New Coates House Hotel, it was built in 1889–1891, incorporating parts of an earlier hotel, which had been built in the late 1860s as the Broadway Hotel and then became the Coates House after a change in ownership. In 1978, when it had become primarily single-room occupancy for transients, it burned in the deadliest fire in the city's history. It was subsequently restored and is now an apartment building.

First hotel

The first hotel on the site, at 10th Street and Broadway, was designed in 1857 by John Johnson, an English architect who later became the third mayor of Kansas City, as part of the development of former farmland owned by Kersey Coates that later became the neighborhood of Quality Hill; at the time it was ten blocks south of downtown. The building was unfinished when the Civil War broke out; Union forces used the foundations for a cavalry barracks, part of Camp Union.

Originally called the Broadway Hotel, it was owned and built in the late 1860s by anti-slavery Colonel Shalor Winchell Eldridge (1816–1899) from Massachusetts, who was elected a Commissioner of Lawrence, Kansas, appointed Quartermaster of the State of Kansas, and appointed U.S. Army Paymaster by President Lincoln; it was then managed by his brother Thomas Bailey Eldridge (1825-1897). Colonel Eldridge was already well known for his other hotel, the Eldridge House, which he rebuilt three times in defiance of a local pro-slavery judge and sheriff who fired on his hotel with a canon and then set it ablaze. Broadway Hotel was a five-story brick building with a mansard roof. It did not prosper, and in 1870 Coates acquired it and it was renamed the Coates House.