[The Antlers Hotel, Colorado Springs].

This striking Photochrom print, published by the Detroit Photographic Company after a watercolor rendering by Charles Graham and signed in the plate, Graham, NY, 1901, depicts the second Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs, a building that no longer exists.

The first Antlers, built by General William Jackson Palmer in 1883 as the centerpiece of his vision for Colorado Springs as a resort destination, had burned to the ground in 1898. The second, designed by Frederick J. Sterner in the Mission Revival style and opened in 1901, was itself demolished in 1964. What Graham recorded here, and the Detroit Photographic Company reproduced with the rich chromatic fidelity of the Photochrom process, is the new hotel in its first year, still fresh, the carriages at its door, Pikes Peak snow-capped above it, and the broad plain of Colorado stretching away to the horizon below.

The View in Detail

The hotel sprawls across the composition in warm cream and tan stone beneath a red-tile roof, the structure articulated by two contrasting towers. At the left, a tall, square campanile rises to an octagonal turret capped with a steep conical spire; at the right, a shorter, round tower with an open, arcaded belfry carries a matching red cone. Between them the façade is animated by rows of striped green awnings over the windows, wrought-iron balconies, and decorative Spanish Revival detailing above the upper windows. At the near corner, a covered glass conservatory projects outward, and an arched loggia runs along the entire ground floor at the main entrance. A circular fountain sits in the carriage drive before the hotel, with manicured gardens to the left featuring circular flower beds in reds and pinks against clipped lawns.

The foreground is populated with the leisure class these prints were designed to evoke: figures in Victorian and Edwardian dress strolling along the paths, gathering at the entrance, and waiting near the fountain, while horse-drawn carriages line the drive to the right.

Behind the hotel, we see the front range of the Rockies: Pikes Peak, snow-capped, fills the upper left of the composition, the forested lower ridges falling away to a hazy plain that extends to the horizon. The sky is rendered in the loose atmospheric washes characteristic of Graham’s illustrative work, reproduced here with the tonal richness and chromatic depth that made the Photochrom process the preferred medium for American resort promotional printing at the turn of the century. The paper shows some toning and edge wear consistent with a work over a century old, but the color throughout remains vivid, and the composition is fully intact.

Historical Context

Colorado Springs was William Jackson Palmer’s creation from the ground up. Palmer had founded the city in 1871 as the northern terminus of his Denver and Rio Grande Railway, envisioning it as a refined resort destination for Eastern tourists and health-seekers drawn by the dry mountain air. The original Antlers Hotel, which he named for the collection of antlers decorating his nearby house Glen Eyrie, opened in 1883 and immediately became the social center of the region. When it burned in 1898, Palmer rebuilt without hesitation, commissioning Sterner to design a larger and more architecturally ambitious replacement in the Mission Revival style then fashionable for Western resort hotels. The second Antlers opened in 1901, the year of this print, accommodating the steady stream of visitors arriving via Palmer’s railway to see Pikes Peak, Garden of the Gods, and the Broadmoor district. It remained the premier hotel of Colorado Springs through the first half of the twentieth century before being demolished to make way for a third building in 1964.

Publication History and Census

Photochrom print on paper, signed in the plate Graham, NY, 1901, lower right. The Photochrom process, a complex lithographic technique developed in Switzerland and licensed exclusively in the United States to the Detroit Photographic Company, produced color prints of exceptional tonal richness from black-and-white photographic negatives, achieving a quality that closely resembles hand-colored photography. The Detroit Photographic Company used the process extensively for promotional views of American resort destinations, railway routes, and landmarks in the 1890s and 1900s.