Welcome to the #AtoZ Blog Challenge and a Tour of Hotels, Inns & Spas

The current O.Henry Hotel on the left with the original on the right

Be sure to watch the Youtube Video 

Hotels with a literary connection, and where famous people resided for a time, interest me. I’m glad the O. Henry Hotel was recreated in Greensboro after the original was raised. The O. Henry is named after American writer and Greensboro native William Sydney Porter, whose pen name was O. Henry. The original Hotel was built in downtown Greensboro in 1919 at the southwest corner of Bellemeade and North Elm Streets. The New York Times reported that “No memorial could be more appropriate for ‘O. Henry’ than a hotel and that no other would have pleased his fancy. ‘A lot of famous writers,’ said one guest, ‘have houses they once occupied preserved in their honor, but O. Henry lived most of his life in hotels. A hotel is representative of him as no house could be, and representative, too, of his stories, which were chiefly concerned with the transient guests of life, the waifs and strays of present-day existence who found in hotels and restaurants the setting for so many of their poignant adventures.’”  This description is enough to make me want to spend time at The O. Henry, a place I have not been. If you watch the video you will see the artist in residence, Chip Holton at work. Let’s have tea at 4:00. See you there.

“Each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.”
― O. Henry