The Elton Hotel is located at 30 West Main Street in downtown Waterbury, Connecticut, United States.

It was built in 1904 to replace a lavish hotel lost in a fire that destroyed much of downtown Waterbury two years earlier.

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.

[2] 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.

In the late 1970s, when the Downtown Waterbury Historic District was created, the hotel building was included as a contributing property.

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.

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.

On the ground floor the central entrance is round arched, and the flanking windows are rectangular, done in stained glass with a heraldric motif on their upper section.

The east facade, overlooking a narrow alley between the hotel and its lower neighbor, is midway between the north and south in terms of decoration.

A copper railing with bulbed balustrade runs along the top of the first story; behind it is the skylight that once lit the dining room.

In 1902, a fire burned a three-acre (1.2 ha) area on the east side of Waterbury Green, destroying 42 buildings in the process.

To replace it, the Scovills and other families prominent in the brass and other industries pooled their money, a total of $300,000 ($10.6 million in contemporary dollars[4]) to build a newer, more sophisticated hotel for visiting business travelers.

He had already designed two distinctive buildings in the city, the nearby Odd Fellows Hall, a rare use of the Venetian Gothic, and the offices of the Waterbury Clock Company.

His design for the hotel featured an elegant exterior, in which many Second Renaissance Revival features like a flat roof, bracketed cornice and quoins were augmented by the classically inspired carved stone ornamentation like the flowers, fruits and festoons, and the smaller-scale elements like the ogee curves in the windows, decoration more common on Beaux-Arts structures of the era.

It covered a modern interior that used some of the newest technologies, from its steel frame structural system to the elevators, electric lighting and telephones in every room.

Almon C. Judd, the manager, made it the starting point for the "Ideal Tour", in which a convoy of motorists would depart from Waterbury to visit major resort hotels in northern New England, at sites like Crawford Notch, Sunapee Lake and Poland Spring.

Those trips inspired his short story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", later published in The New Yorker, widely reprinted and considered a classic of American literature.

[2] On October 10, 1922 a group of 15 men, led by Dr. Anthony P. Vastola, met in the basement of the Elton and established Unico National, an Italian American service organization to engage in charitable works, support higher education, and perform patriotic deeds.

At 3 a.m. on November 6, 1960, John F. Kennedy spoke to a crowd estimated to be at least 40,000 gathered on the Green from the hotel's balcony, the concluding stop of an election-eve motorcade up the Naugatuck Valley.

The size of the crowd, and the enthusiasm with which they greeted Kennedy both at the speech and when he attended Mass at Immaculate Conception in the morning, led state Democratic chairman John Moran Bailey to predict that the senator from Massachusetts would carry the state, then dominated by Republicans.