The first Hotel Roanoke opened in 1882 on a rise above the rail yards — a grand hotel commissioned by the Norfolk & Western Railway to give its new city a proper front door. The 1890 expansion was done in high Victorian style: asymmetric towers, elaborate porches, a dining room for four hundred. Every president from McKinley to FDR stopped here. The hotel was the face of the city; the city was the face of the railroad.
In 1938 Norfolk & Western tore the Victorian wing down and replaced it with the current structure — subdued, rectangular, fashionably restrained by Depression-era standards. No catastrophe. No fire. Just the railroad deciding the old shape was unfashionable and the new shape was cheaper to maintain. The 1910 Detroit Publishing photograph is the best surviving image of what the front door of Roanoke used to look like. Buildings rarely survive the conviction that the era that made them is over.
What stood here
4 surviving images.
A wide view of the front of the Hotel Roanoke as seen from the top of the Wells Fargo Tower, 2015
Hotel Roanoke front entrance — the 1938 Tudor Revival structure that replaced the Victorian wings demolished that same year, 2008
![[Postcard of Hotel Roanoke]](https://pub-36c0afda6c3c4162bf71a61d3dc866bc.r2.dev/city_stories/ba586535-9746-4bf2-ba9a-63de9a97d913/ghost_images_2.jpg)
[Postcard of Hotel Roanoke]
Hotel Roanoke, Roanoke, Virginia — period postcard view showing the hotel as it appeared in the 1930s before the Tudor Revival renovation, c.1930–1945