Omni Parker House

Story

Built in 1927, the Omni Parker House is a historic hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. The original Parker House Hotel opened on the site on October 8, 1855, making it the longest continuously operating hotel in the United States. Additions and alterations were made to the original building starting only five years after its opening. Between 1866 and 1925, the hotel increased in size with new stories and additions, eventually expanding its footprint over 41,400 square feet of land—the bulk of the city lot bordered by Tremont, School, and Bosworth Streets and Chapman Place. Founder Harvey D. Parker ran the hotel until his death in 1884, when the business passed on to his partners. Subsequent proprietors of the Parker House were Edward O. Punchard and Joseph H. Beckman (1884–1891), Joseph Reed Whipple and the J. R. Whipple Corporation (1891–1933), Glenwood Sherrard (1933–1968), the Dunfey family (1968–1996), and Robert Rowling of TRT Holdings (1996–present). Omni Parker House, Boston, is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is currently under study for becoming a Boston Landmark.History19th centuryOpened in 1855 by Harvey D. Parker and located on School Street near the corner of Tremont, not far from the seat of the Massachusetts state government, the hotel has long been a rendezvous for politicians.The hotel was home to the Saturday Club, which met on the fourth Saturday of every month, except during July, August, and September. Among the Saturday Club’s nineteenth-century members were poet, essayist, and preeminent transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and The Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell, scientist Louis Agassiz, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, diplomat Charles Francis Adams, historian Francis Parkman, and sage-about-town Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.