West Hotel

It had 407 luxuriously furnished rooms, 140 baths, and featured an immense and opulent lobby which was claimed to be the largest in the nation.

The West was designed by LeRoy Buffington and built on land that was once owned by the first resident of Minneapolis, John H. Stevens.

Buffington created the West in the Queen Anne style that was quite popular in the last decades of the 19th century.

The West hotel was situated on the southwest corner of the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street (the site currently occupied, in part, by the Shubert Theatre, moved there in 1999), in the center of a burgeoning entertainment district that started coming together in the 1880s and was a temporary home to such well-known public figures as Mark Twain and Winston Churchill.

It also catered to delegates of the 1892 Republican National Convention (held at the Exposition Building across the Mississippi River).