Here is an image I found on the UTA website of the lobby of the Westbrook Hotel in 1975 just after they moved the permanent residents out and before it was closed and ultimately imploded:
http://library.uta.e...ad2e0d30b90.jpg
What is remarkable is, apart from the furniture and the glass bricks on the registration desk, the lobby looked pretty much the same as it did when the hotel opened in 1911. It is remarkable given that the other two big, grand hotels in downtown which were between one and two decades newer than the Westbrook by then had their original lobbies destroyed by various "modernizations."
Seeing how the lobby was almost perfectly intact and in such beautiful condition, to me this picture makes the hotel's destruction even more sad. It is not as if the place was a rotting ruin - and what replaced it for close to four decades was nothing more than a parking lot. Too bad it could not have been mothballed until a decade or two later when people actually started to rediscover, value and restore such buildings. At least as far as the lobby was concerned, it wouldn't have even required a restoration - though I am sure the hotel rooms were probably obsolete and small by modern standards and would have required being gutted and rebuilt as is the case when most vintage hotels are brought back. If the building and its lobby managed to survive and had been brought back as a hotel, it would unquestionably today be the grandest hotel downtown. The Blackstone and the Texas which still survive were grander than the Westbrook back in their day - but, in both cases, their interior grandeur was destroyed a long time ago and I doubt that anybody would be willing to spend the kind of money it would take to bring that back.
Look at the light fixtures. I wonder if somebody saved them and, if so, where they are now.
