Category:Edgewater Hotel

Located at 1001 Wisconsin Place (originally 666 Wisconsin Avenue) in Madison, Wisconsin, and built in 1946–48, the Edgewater Hotel was designed by the Danish-American architect Lawrence Monberg for Dr. Abraham A. Quisling, a prominent Madison physician of Norwegian descent (see the Property Record online). Along with the Quisling Towers and Quisling Clinic, it was the third of Quisling's three notable Art Moderne or Streamline Moderne buildings on Wisconsin Avenue evoking the “stream liner” trains and “ocean liner” ships of the era. The hotel was intended to feature a more bold and complex design, but material limitations caused by World War II and an increase in labor and material costs forced the plans to be simplified, eliminating the planned curved entrance, decorative ornament and trim, curved corners of the building facing Lake Mendota, and a two-story glass facade housing a bar and restaurant on the first two floors of the building facing the lake.

The original hotel building is a contributing structure in the Mansion Hill Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. Now known as the Langdon Building, it remains in use today as a hotel.

The original building is clad in buff brick with long ribbons of windows that de-emphasize the ten-story building’s verticality across most of the facade. The ribbons of windows are framed by narrow bands of trim and have stacked bond brick panels between the individual window openings, which feature one-over-one windows and windows that wrap the corners of the building. Vertical extruded brick walls on the facade at the location of the building’s original entrance feature circular windows on each floor, an example of the nautical themes and motifs often employed with the Art Moderne and Streamline Moderne styles.

When it opened, the hotel was managed by Augie Faulkner, who bought the property from the Quisling family in 1952. The hotel was expanded with a five-story podium at the end of Wisconsin Avenue in 1972, which housed 40 additional guest rooms, a ballroom, new lobby, and The Admiralty Room, an upscale restaurant. The aging hotel was finally sold by the Faulkner family in 2012.

The hotel’s exterior is rather boxy and simple, featuring fewer flourishes than the original concept, though the originally planned curved entrance canopy and lobby and a two-story glass-walled bar and restaurant were finally added during the 2012–14 renovation, utilizing modern materials that do not entirely match the original intention. The renovation also added an eleventh floor to the building, which is clad in glass and features a rooftop terrace facing Lake Mendota. The building’s original steel windows were removed in a prior renovation, and the circular entrance canopy and tapered window wall on the second floor facing the lake were removed during the 2012–14 renovation. The renovation restored the remaining Art Moderne elements inside the building and added new features that complement the original style of the building, adding back lost features. All of the hotel rooms were expanded and modernized as part of the renovation.

Governor Oscar Rennebohm was present at the 1948 opening, and over the years the hotel has seen numerous prominent guests including famous celebrities, with Elvis taking one of the hotel’s clothes hangers as a souvenir. Now on display at Graceland, it inspired Cyndi Lauper’s song “Water’s Edge.”