Hotel Retlaw

The Hotel Retlaw opened in 1923 at One North Main Street in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, eight stories of neoclassical brick rising over a city that had, until then, gotten by without a grand hotel of its own. Herbert W. Tullgren, the Milwaukee architect behind it, gave the building the kind of civic dignity usually reserved for state capitols and county courthouses.

The name is a small piece of trivia guests still ask about: Retlaw is Walter spelled backward, a nod to Walter Schroeder, the hotelier whose chain once stretched across Wisconsin. It’s the sort of detail that tells you something about the era, when a hotel could double as a statement of a city’s ambitions.