The Baker Hotel

In the town of Mineral Wells there is a vacant, abandoned hotel.  The Baker.  It has been for sale for many years.  And as it sits waiting for a new owner, it is deteriorating.  Badly.  On Saturday, April 11th, I ventured out for the day with other photographers.   We ended up eating lunch in Mineral Wells and found ourselves in front of The Baker.  A fence was down and before I knew it, we were taking photos by the old swimming pool.

The history of the Baker is very interesting.  It was built by hotel magnate T. B. Baker and it opened it’s doors 2 weeks after the crash of the 1929 stock market.  Built with 14 stories, it had 450 rooms.  Eleven floors were for hotel rooms and it had room for 50 apartments above the main roofline.  Those apartments had use of a solarium.  It was once reported that at that time only two hotels in the United States had swimming pools with The Baker being one of them, but there is no evidence that the report is true.  Here’s a photo of the kitchen that The Baker had beside the swimming pool.

The Baker filed for bankruptcy in 1932 but the new owners were able to keep it open.  It was also used as a military dependent quarters during World War II.  After that it stayed open as a hotel until 1963. It was open once again in 1965 through 1972 but since then it has not been reopened as a hotel.  During it’s glory days, The Baker had celebrities like Will Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow and Helen Keller as its guests.  It was a fabulous place I’m sure.  Hard to believe that in the 1930s if you had $35 you could stay there for a week, but back then that would have been a lot of money.

Many famous entertainers performed at the hotel–Lawrence Welk, Pat Boone, Mary Martin and Judy Garland.

It is said that Mr. Baker had his 3 bedroom 5 bath apartment on the 7th floor and that the ghost of his mistress haunts it still.  Rumors are that she was distraught from the affair and jumped to her death from the top of the building.  Supposedly her room was on the southeast corner of the 7th floor and many have reported smelling her perfume there.

It is truly an awesome building and it is a shame that it continues to sit abandoned like this.  I have no idea what the selling price is but for sure it would cost someone a pretty chunk of change to fix it up.  It has been fenced up but as you can see by the broken windows either the fence is doing no good or it was put up too late plus the fact that when we stopped there at least a 20 foot section of fence was completely gone on the east side.

Uh oh.  We didn’t see this sign until we’d already taken half our photos.  So from that point on I didn’t cross anymore fences.  I will admit that I did climb the steps and took some photos on the walkway and through a window.  (That’s how I got that photo of the lobby.)  By the time we left, there had been at least 20 or 30 more people stopping by The Baker to take photos.  I’m thinking the city should rent it and open it up for photographers and tour groups.  If you’d like to see more of the photos that I took of The Baker that day, be sure to go to my photo gallery site.  They should be under the category “Places.”

~ Sandy

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