The Hotel Wausau is an eight-story Classical Revival-style hotel erected in 1925 in the heart of downtown Wausau and designed by Chicago architects Holabird & Roche. Containing 257 guest rooms, eight ground-floor retail stores, and several guest amenities, including a spacious reception lobby and lounge, a hotel coffee shop and barber shop, and a large dining room and ballroom, the Hotel Wausau served as the city’s premier hotel as well as a popular and stylish venue for local meetings and special events. Its eight leasable commercial units along its primary facades further elevated the role of the hotel in the city’s commercial and civic environment. The Hotel Wausau was the seventh facility completed by prominent Wisconsin hotelier Walter Schroeder, whose successful chain promoted the concept of fireproof luxury hotels with accommodations at various price points to meet the needs of travelers across the socioeconomic spectrum.

The Hotel Wausau is notable as an excellent example of the Classical Revival architectural style, which was popularized by the Classically inspired “White City” at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. The Classical Revival style provided a sophisticated antidote to the architectural excesses of the Victorian period, embracing the symmetry and order of ancient Greece and Rome. Its overtones of wealth, power, and stability made it a popular choice for institutional and commercial buildings throughout the United States between 1900 and 1930. At the Hotel Wausau, the finely designed Classical Revival exterior projected the high quality of the accommodations to be found within.

The Hotel Wausau also embodies the transition of upscale American hotel architecture from the luxurious but inefficient Victorian “gilt palace” hotels of the late nineteenth century to a more affordable, modern model that offered Americans of all social classes elegant and efficiently designed entertainment spaces and accommodations. The embrace of the commercial hotel concept by early-twentieth-century hotel owners and architects drove the construction of hundreds of examples in cities across the country in the 1910s and 1920s.,