herr2ck: Keeper of the Western Door

April 2026.

The Seneca Hotel, now an apartment complex known as The Seneca, is a good example of the severe, later Beaux-Arts hotel/apartment designs that sprouted up in just about every city in America in the 1910s and 1920s. It has the common “winged” plan that allows units to get light and fresh air in a time before air conditioning, which is perched on a three-story pedestal. Abandoned for a time and now converted to apartments, the Seneca Hotel is a great example of adaptive reuse.

The building is located at 367 East Broad Street in the Discovery District neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. It is bordered by Broad Street to the north, Capital Street and the Library Park apartments to the south, commercial buildings to the east, and Grant Avenue and the Capital University Law School to the west.

History

A postcard of the hotel. (Columbus Metropolitan Library)

The Seneca Hotel was built in 1917 by prominent Columbus architect Frank Packard in association with David Riebel & Sons (another well-known architect who designed Columbus’s Victorian-era public schools). With a steel and reinforced concrete frame allowing it to stand ten stories, it is an example of the Beaux-Arts style. Its owner, Frank C. Huling, named the hotel after his father’s native Seneca County in northwest Ohio, which in turn is named after the Seneca tribe of Native Americans. The 1917 portion mostly faces Grant Avenue.

A view of the garage in 1983. (NRHP listing)

Two additions have been built onto the building. The first is a garage that could store 35 cars, which was built in 1918. This added to the hotel’s prestige, as it is an early example of a parking garage in Columbus. In 1924, a four-story addition was built onto the northeast side of the hotel facing Broad Street, which was very similar in its design to the main hotel building. This addition changed the building’s plan into an L-shape.

The demolished Charminel Hotel. (Columbus Metropolitan Library)

The Seneca Hotel is notable in that it was the first apartment hotel building in Columbus. As opposed to a typical hotel, apartment hotels have amenities more typical to a residential apartment, and guests are able to stay as long as they’d like. They were popular in cities like New York City, but very unusual in Columbus. The NRHP listing notes two apartment hotels that were located in Columbus around the same time--the Charminel and Norwich Hotels. The 1925 Charminel Hotel, since demolished, was located at 342 East State Street (across the street from Grant Hospital). The Norwich Hotel still stands at the northeast cover of 4th and State Streets, and I covered it in my State Street article. However, it was built as an office building in the 1890s and later converted to a hotel.

The Seneca Hotel’s placement on Broad Street was also no accident, as it was a well-to-do residential area at the time with a tree-lined boulevard. However, this was rapidly changing with the impact of the automobile, and the hotel was one of the new buildings that changed the area’s residential character to a more commercial one. It was too far east of downtown and did not seek to compete with the prominent downtown hotels, which had more transient visitors. (Many of these have been demolished, except for the Great Southern Hotel. I’ve also written about the demolished Chittenden Hotel, Deshler Hotel, and Neil House.)

Along with its role as a hotel, the building also hosted several businesses and offices. Over its lifetime, it has housed the University Club, Junior League, Anheuser-Busch, cigar shops, clothiers, beauty parlors, and a radio broadcast station for WMAN and WSEN.

Mid-century color photo of the lobby. (Columbus Metropolitan Library)

The Seneca Hotel closed in the mid-1960s, as was common for smaller early 20th century hotels. It still remained in use as the Nationwide Beauty Academy circa 1960 to 1974, and the former rooms were used as dormitories for Nationwide and several other nearby schools.

The exterior in 1983. (NRHP listing)

Beginning in 1976, the Seneca Hotel was being used as offices for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places during their tenancy in 1983, but the EPA left in 1987, and the building was abandoned between 1988 and 2005. It was then listed on the Columbus Register of Historic Properties in 1991. Despite threats of demolition, as is usually the fate for Columbus’s great historic architecture, the vacant building was restored from 2005 to 2008 by Campus Apartments. It reopened that year as The Seneca and remains an apartment building today.

Photos

A nice oblique view of the Seneca Hotel from the northwest corner of Broad Street and Grant Avenue:

Broad Street facade of the 1917 building:

The four-story addition is very similar to the original building, but it has commercial storefronts with glass prism transom windows and pilasters dividing them. The windows above have a similar terra-cotta pattern. I do wish that it was only three stories to match the original height of the base, as the extra floor looks like part of the building got chopped off (especially with its tiny, out-of-scale cornice).

The Grant Avenue facade from a nearby parking lot:

Note is branching layout, as I mentioned in the intro. I wanted to get further away in order to reduce the tilting effect of the wide angle, but the lot was packed with cars and they would have blocked the pedestal.

Oblique view from the southwest end:

Notice how the alley-facing facade lacks any ornamentation at all. It’s not cost-effective to decorate an area that is surrounded by smelly dumpsters and similar sanitation-related objects.

The two-bay wings:

These are simpler and largely brick, aside from the slight terra-cotta border on the top two floors, the two string courses, and the little rosette below the parapet.

These three-bay wings at the ends are more fanciful, with more intricate ornamentation:

Looking up at the two smaller wings rising up from the pedestal:

The pedestal has a strong horizontal emphasis with its various string courses, though the more vertical windows serve as a foil to this layout. A low, horizontal composition is very common in Renaissance palazzos.

The NRHP listing states that these thoughtfully placed terra-cotta details give the building a sophisticated appearance, while also not detracting from the overall design. As much as I love my mascarons, cherubim, and massive broken pediments, I agree.

These double-height windows seem to indicate the lobby’s space:

…while this single window on the floor above might be the piano nobile of this base:

The three northernmost and southernmost bays on the Grant Avenue side have much more elaborate terra-cotta gingerbread, with broken pediments, keystones with a lion relief, and an entirely terra-cotta border (instead of the alternating design seen earlier).