The Palmer House: Chicago's Wedding-Gift Hotel and Its Troubled Ownership

By Solomon Rokowsky

October 28, 2026

The Grand Lobby, in the Beaux-Arts style. Photo: Spatms. Source. CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized.

The Palmer House sits at State and Monroe streets, and its lobby ceiling is one of the most photographed rooms in Chicago. The hotel is the third to carry the name, was built in 1923 to 1925, and is said to be the longest continuously operating hotel in North America, though it closed during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. It was also, from the start, a love story: Potter Palmer built the first one as a wedding present for his bride, Bertha Honoré.

Behind the gold leaf there is a second story, about who owns what. The hotel, its retail space and its annex are separate pieces, and a long legal fight is not finished.

Three hotels, one corner

The first Palmer House opened on September 26, 1870, at State and Quincy, with 225 rooms. The Chicago History Museum says the furnishings alone cost $100,000, half the cost of the building. The Great Chicago Fire destroyed it a year later, on October 8, 1871. Palmer had already started a replacement at State and Monroe.

Bertha Honore Palmer, wife of Potter Palmer, around 1895. Photo: Katherine Arthur Behenna. Source. Public domain. Resized.

The second Palmer House, a seven-story building by John M. Van Osdel, opened on November 8, 1873, and was advertised as fireproof. Famous visitors in its first years included presidential candidates Garfield, Cleveland and McKinley, and writers Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde. Wikipedia adds that in 1895 a meeting there of Midwestern university faculty representatives led to the founding of the Big Ten Conference.

Hilton's company history says the hotel hosted a banquet in 1879 for about 500 dignitaries to mark President Ulysses S. Grant's return from a trip around the world, with Mark Twain as master of ceremonies.

The Palmer House in the 1950s. Photo: Unknown author. Source. Public domain. Resized.

The 1925 hotel

In the 1920s the Palmer Estate decided to replace the second hotel. Holabird & Roche designed a 25-story building that went up between 1923 and 1925, and it opened with 2,268 rooms, which briefly made it the world's largest hotel by room count. The Chicago History Museum puts its cost at about $20 million. It has been renovated since, and now has about 1,640 rooms.

In December 1945 Conrad Hilton bought the hotel for $20 million, and it became the Palmer House Hilton. The Empire Room, up a marble staircase, became a supper club in 1933. Entertainers who played there included Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Liberace.

The painted lobby ceiling. Photo: Daderot. Source. CC0. Resized.

The lobby

Hilton says Bertha Palmer commissioned the French muralist Louis Pierre Rigal to paint 21 frescoes on the lobby's domed ceiling, with subjects from Greek mythology that include Aphrodite, Apollo and Pluto. The ceiling was restored by hand, Hilton says, by Lido Lippi, who had worked on the Sistine Chapel. Louis Comfort Tiffany is credited with the 24-karat gold-dipped chandeliers and the winged angel statues. Lockwood, the lobby restaurant, says its bar sits under 21 mythological frescoes lit by Tiffany winged-angel candelabras.

A peacock door in the hotel. Photo: Tony Hisgett. Source. CC BY 2.0. Resized.

The brownie

The hotel claims to be the home of the brownie. Hilton says Bertha Palmer, who was president of the Board of Lady Managers for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, asked the hotel's pastry chef for a dessert that could go into box lunches for the Women's Building and travel well. The result was a dense chocolate square with walnuts that is still made from the original recipe. Time Out and Lockwood both point visitors to the brownies at Lockwood Express.

Visiting the Palmer House

The hotel is at 17 East Monroe Street. A visit to the lobby is easy, and the usual way to see it is to sit for a drink or a meal. I did not find a published policy on lobby visits by non-guests, so treat the restaurants as the sure way in.

For the exterior, the corner of State and Monroe shows the hotel's 1925 mass. At street level, the retail space along State Street and Monroe has been mostly vacant. A Morningstar analyst quoted by Bisnow described it as almost completely vacant in June 2026.

Vacant ground-floor retail space facing State and Monroe streets. Photo: Pokemonprime. Source. CC BY 4.0. Resized.

Who owns the Palmer House today?

The Palmer House was split into three parcels after Thor Equities bought it from Hilton in 2005, and each has a different story. Hilton kept the management contract, so Hilton is the operator.

The hotel: Bondholders won a judgment of foreclosure against Thor in Cook County in 2022 on a $333.2 million mortgage that went into default in 2020, according to Bisnow. The hotel has not sold, because a separate lawsuit over a licensing agreement is still open, and the loan was declared non-recoverable. The Real Deal still called Thor the owner in June 2026. I found no record showing who holds title to the hotel parcel today, so I am leaving it unresolved.

The retail, office and parking portion at 17 East Monroe, about 68,000 square feet: after a foreclosure on a separate retail mortgage, the special servicer LNR Partners took it through a sheriff's sale in 2023 with a high bid of $29.5 million, according to Bisnow. In September 2026 Thor reported that it had bought this retail component back for about $5.15 million. Thor's own post says so, and Bisnow and The Real Deal reported it. The retail space is about 35 percent occupied, according to Bisnow.

The annex that holds mechanical systems: I found no ownership information.

The Cook County Assessor's 2025 records for the five parcels I found at 17 East Monroe list the owner and mailing name as "Thor Palmer House." That label does not match the 2023 sheriff's sale, so it shows how far tax labels can lag. It is not a deed. Read October 28, 2026.

Where can you eat or drink at the Palmer House?

Lockwood Restaurant & Bar is in the lobby at 17 East Monroe. Its website says the restaurant is open daily from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., with breakfast and lunch each day and dinner served on most evenings. The pages I read give two different dinner start times, 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., so confirm. The Lobby Bar at Lockwood serves drinks from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and food from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Lockwood Express, just off the lobby, sells coffee, pastries, sandwiches and the original-recipe brownie. These details were read from lockwoodrestaurant.com on October 28, 2026. Hours can change on event days.