Affordable Housing Finance Magazine, 2000 (Reprinted with permission. for subscription information call 800-989-7255. www.housingfinance.com
Wichita, Kan. – Renovation and expansion of the historic Eaton Hotel block here as a mixed-use development was completed late last year. That was almost exactly 100 years to the day after Carry Nation furthered her career as a fearless temperance crusader by destroying its bar.
The developer, MetroPlains of St. Paul, Minn., has redeveloped the entire city block containing the 114 year-old hotel. It sits between downtown and the Old Town neighborhood, which has enjoyed a rebound in recent years.
Some 75 apartments, including 26 affordables, were created within the historic buildings, each with a different floor plan. Forty more apartments are new construction, designed to complement the historic portion of the development. Thirty thousand square feet of ground-floor retain and office space, a three-level paring ramp, and a pedestrian arcade round out the site.
The total development cost was $15 million, including $6 million in tax exempt bonds issued by the city of Wichita, $1.3 million in privately placed bonds, $1.7 million in federal HOME grants, $1.2 million in Community Development Block Grant loans, $2.5 million in historic and low-income housing tax credit equity, and a $1.5 million conventional mortgage loan. The city, which acquired the land from the previous private owner, continues to own the site, but MetroPlains has a 99-year lease on the property.
As for Carry Amelia Moore Nation (1846-1911), she is remembered as a crusader against Demon Rum who destroyed many saloons. What fueled her ardor for temperance was her brief marriage in the 1860s to an alcoholic, which ended in his death. After she remarried – her second husband was the minister David Nation – and settled in Kansas, where making and selling alcohol was illegal, she felt divine inspiration to promote temperance by any means necessary. She began by giving lectures and leading public prayers for a few years before she launched a direct action campaign against drinking places.
In December 1900, she arrived in Wichita, notorious for saloons that defied the state law, walked the town, and selected the Eaton Hotel as a target. The next day, concealing a rod, cane, and rocks underneath her cape, she went to its gaudy saloon and destroyed it.
Nearly six feet tall and 180 pounds, crying to her followers, “Smash, ladies, smash!” as she attacked such saloons, Nation could hardly escape making an impression.
A month after she attacked the Wichita hotel, she began taking a hatchet to saloons. The hatchet quickly became her trademark, as she began calling her raids “hatchetations.”
Her activities prompted 30 arrests by 1910, including one for the damage at the Eaton. But jails couldn’t hold her, because her fees from lecturing and profits selling souvenir hatches paid her costs, and because court cases inevitably raised the point that saloonkeepers were flouting the law. Though she died in 1911, years before nationwide Prohibition, she is considered to have been one of the key forces in its adoption. |
