Bryn Mawr Apartment Hotel, Historic apartment hotel in Edgewater, Chicago, United States.
Bryn Mawr Apartment Hotel is a 12-story building in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, with a white terra cotta facade decorated in a Gothic Revival style. It stands on North Kenmore Avenue and was designed to combine long-term residential living with hotel-style services.
The building was designed by the firms Koenigsberg & Weisfeld and Levy & Klein and completed in 1929, during a period when Edgewater was growing as a residential area north of downtown Chicago. It was later designated a Chicago Landmark in 2002.
Apartment hotels like this one served residents who wanted the comfort of a home without the duties of housekeeping, a lifestyle that appealed to many city professionals at the time. The Gothic Revival ornament on the facade was chosen to signal respectability and permanence to passersby.
The building is in Edgewater, a neighborhood that is easy to walk around, with local shops and cafes nearby along the main streets. The Lake Michigan shoreline is also within comfortable walking distance.
The name Bryn Mawr comes from Welsh and means something close to 'great hill', brought to the area by real estate developers in the late 19th century who wanted to give the neighborhood a refined image. The same name was used for the famous Pennsylvania college, and its presence in Chicago reflects the fashion of borrowing place names from the East Coast to add prestige.
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