Blackstone Hotel

The Blackstone Hotel is an Art-deco skyscraper designed by Mauran, Russell & Crowell, and built in 1929 in Fort Worth, TX.

Blackstone Hotel is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The building has changed names several times over the years, and is also known as:

• Blackstone Hotel between 1929 and 1952.
• Hilton Hotel between 1952 and 1962.
• Blackstone Hotel (again) between 1962 and 1982.
• Courtyard by Marriott Foth Worth from 1999 until this day.

Its precise street address is 601 Main Street, Fort Worth, TX. You can also find it on the map here.

The Blackstone Hotel is a structure of significant importance both for the city of Fort Worth and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the Blackstone Hotel was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on February 2^nd 1984, and was also included in the Fort Worth Register of Historic Places in 1998.

The building underwent a major restoration in 1952.

Mauran, Russell & Crowell was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design. But there was also one other architect involved, as far as we know. We are talking about Elmer G. Withers.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Blackstone Hotel a reality:

• Bellows and Maclay as the Main Contractor
• C.A. as the Main Developer

The Blackstone Hotel can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Blackstone Hotel was completed in 1929, right when the Art Deco movement was at its peak, so it kind of went with the trend at that time.

The Blackstone Hotel uses a frame structure made of reinforced concrete columns and beams.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade is a non-load bearing masonry facade. This type of facade became common during the period when buildings, especially taller ones, transitioned from load-bearing wall systems to frame structures.

Frame structures allowed facades to be independent from the building's frame, enabling the use of lighter materials and larger openings. However, it took some time for architects to incorporate these new posibilities into their designs, and so for a while they simply replicated the look and feel fo buildings people where used to seeing.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features irregular setbacks and ornamental terra cotta detailing combined with buff-colored brick. The ground-level facades are clad with Minnesota granite. The second floor is separated from the upper floors by a thin strip of terracotta. The brick pillars that divide the facade from the third floor are crowned with terracotta ornaments. On the upper level, the building features setbacks with terraces..