The Hotel Harney and Lost Downtown Landmarks
Every old downtown is partly a record of what is no longer there. A walk along Rapid City’s main streets passes parking lots that were once hotels, modern storefronts that replaced ornate brick blocks, and open sky where a tall building used to interrupt it. Among the structures that the twentieth century took away, the Hotel Harney stood for a long while as one of the more substantial, a multistory hostelry that served travelers in the decades when a good hotel was a mark of a town’s ambitions.
A serious hotel mattered to a place like Rapid City. The town had set itself up as the trade and supply center for the Black Hills and the surrounding ranch country, and that role brought a steady traffic of salesmen, cattle buyers, railroad men, lawyers working the courthouse, and, increasingly through the early twentieth century, tourists bound for the scenery and, after the 1930s, for Mount Rushmore. Those visitors needed beds, dining rooms, and a lobby grand enough to make a stranger feel he had arrived somewhere of consequence. The hotels competed for that business, and their buildings were among the largest and most carefully designed in the downtown.
The Hotel Harney took its name, as so many things in the region did, from the prominent peak in the southern Hills then called Harney Peak, the high point that has since been renamed Black Elk Peak. The name carried the prestige of the Hills themselves. For years the hotel functioned as one of the town’s gathering places, the sort of address where a banquet might be held, a political meeting convened, or an out-of-town guest lodged for a stay. Its later life followed a familiar arc for downtown hotels across the country. As automobile travel reshaped the way people moved, and as motels along the highways and newer accommodations drew away the trade, the older downtown hotels lost their footing. Buildings that had once been the pride of a block became expensive to maintain and harder to fill.
The arithmetic of demolition
The story of the Harney is the story of many downtown landmarks. A building grows old. Its systems need replacing, its rooms feel cramped by modern standards, and the cost of bringing it up to date runs higher than the income it can produce. At some point an owner does the arithmetic and concludes that the land is worth more cleared than built upon, and down the structure comes. The grandest survivor of that era in Rapid City is the Hotel Alex Johnson, which made it through to a time when historic buildings were valued again and could be restored. Others did not.
The losses were not confined to hotels. Across the middle decades of the twentieth century, Rapid City, like nearly every American city, traded a good deal of its older fabric for parking, for newer commercial buildings, and for the wider streets that automobile traffic demanded. Ornate nineteenth-century commercial blocks, with their pressed-metal cornices and tall arched windows, were considered dated and inefficient. Some were modernized beyond recognition behind flat new facades. Others were simply taken down. The catastrophic flood of 1972 added its own toll, scouring away structures on the low ground near the creek and prompting the clearance of the floodplain that followed.
What is lost in these demolitions is more than handsome architecture, though that is real enough. A building like the old Harney was a repository of accumulated memory, the place where a generation of weddings, conventions, reunions, and ordinary overnight stays had happened. When it disappears, the events that occurred inside it lose their physical anchor and survive only in photographs and recollection. A town keeps its history partly in its buildings, and a downtown that has demolished its landmarks has to work harder to remember itself.
There has been a counter-movement, of course. The same decades that destroyed so much also produced the historic-preservation impulse that saved the survivors and learned to value the older streetscape. Downtown Rapid City has seen real reinvestment in its remaining historic blocks, and the buildings that came through the lean years are now among the city’s assets. The Hotel Harney is not among them. It belongs instead to the longer list of places that a visitor cannot see anymore, known now only from old photographs, from the recollections of people who passed through its lobby, and from the gap it left on the block.