Historic Tales of Utah (American Chronicles) by Stone Eileen Hallet

Author:Stone, Eileen Hallet [Stone, Eileen Hallet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Boston and Newhouse Buildings—Utah’s first skyscrapers. Utah State Historical Society.

Newhouse was a flamboyant promoter and speculator. He developed contacts on the East Coast, in England and in France. He hired a tutor to educate his wife in the manner of European high society. After acquiring numerous mines in Ouray, Colorado—and selling them later for millions—the couple moved to Denver to further his entrepreneurial leanings.

By 1896, he had turned his attention to Utah.

From the Highland Boy mine in Bingham Canyon to the copper smelter in Murray, Newhouse’s acquisitions and partnerships grew into multi-milliondollar investments. In 1905, he bought the Cactus Silver Mine and mill in the San Francisco Mountains of Beaver Canyon. He then spent more than $2 million to rebuild the nearby mining town, called Newhouse, replete with cottages, homes, boardinghouses, stores, restaurants, a hospital, a school, a park, a livery, a hotel, a dance hall and the “Cactus Club.”

Newhouse hobnobbed with British royalty. He was involved in the creation of New York City’s first steel-frame skyscraper, the Flat Iron Building, and gained and lost mineral rights in China.

He owned Long Island and London estates, a chateau in France and an extravagant home on South Temple in Salt Lake City flush with opulent Persian carpets, Italian marble floors, velvet upholsteries, copper railings, stained-glass windows, silk tapestries and an underground men’s sitting room stocked with 1,400 bottles of wine and imported liquors.

In 1906, Newhouse hired well-known Chicago/New York architect Henry Ives Cobb (a relative of outspoken Utah suffragist Charlotte Cobb Ives Godbe) and in 1907 began construction of the Boston and Newhouse Buildings.

Each stone-faced, fireproof building was steel framed with rounded corners and eleven stories and divided into three horizontal sections emphasizing the “main floors, vertical office floors, and a massive cornice which imitates the base, shaft and capital of a classical column.”

Distinctive though similar in style, a dentil band of cartouches (coatof- arms shields) spreads beneath the second-story cornice of the Boston Building and was replicated below the building’s cornice along the top. Other ornamentation included elaborate lion head stonework.

The Newhouse Building gleamed with a copper-plated door and window trim. Stone pairs of cornucopias, agricultural and industrial symbols and an enormous buffalo headstone were fixed in place. The interiors were drenched in fine woodwork, terrazzo floors, marble stairs, floor-to-ceiling handcrafted mosaic tiles and extensive glass.

Newhouse developed thirty other properties, including the Newhouse Hotel. He donated Exchange Place land for the sumptuous Commercial Club building and the Salt Lake Stock Exchange, where Utah’s stockholders, bankers and mining kings held business, traded and negotiated. His plans were to build up the south-end commercial district.

Shortly before World War I, Newhouse’s financial fortunes unraveled. Unable to obtain domestic or foreign loans, he went bankrupt.

In 1914, the Newhouses’ marriage also dissolved. Ida, who had spent much time in Europe, eventually moved to the Beverly Hills Hotel in California. Relying on the charity of friends, in 1937, she died penniless.

Newhouse lived with his sister in their French chateau. He continued in the world of finance but could not recoup his staggering losses.

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