LOS ANGELES – The Hotel Figueroa opened in Los Angeles nearly six years after women won the right to vote.
“It was created as a place for professional women,” Connie Wang, general manager of Hotel Figueroa, told CBS News.
The Hotel Figueroa was built and financed entirely by a trailblazing group of women in 1926, at a time when almost every hotel barred women from getting a room unless they were accompanied by a man.
A painting of Maude Boldin, its first general manager, hangs in the lobby.
“He famously rode across the country on a motorcycle to take his first job here,” Wang said.
Many guests come for the hotel’s charms, unaware of its incredible history, such as how it was one of the first hotels where women were checked in without a chaperone, according to Wang.
According to Wang, 97 years later, almost everything about Hotel Figueroa is the same as it was.
“We wanted to make sure it still had a very strong sense of time and space,” Wang said.
“Recovery rather than reform was important,” he added.
Every artwork in the hotel was created by women. Asked what she would be most proud to show the hotel’s founders, Wang replied: “How we continue to embrace women in the industry just as they did in the 1920s and 30s.”
And the swimming pool has its own legend.
“Rumor has it that it was made in the shape of a coffin to bury the patriarch,” Wang said.
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Jamie Yukas
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