Recently the Alabama Department of Archives and History shared the news on the Selma Alabama History facebook group that they’d cataloged and stored a large collection of materials relating to the Hotel Albert. Now, I have a minor obsession with the Albert, inspired by both its beauty and my inability to understand why something of such beauty could not simply be allowed to perish, but willfully detroyed. I’ve written a four page history of the building, though I’ve never posted it here because the ending was soft. Now that I’m out of school for the summer, I intend on reworking it and making sure the citations are tight. In the meantime, I’m going to share here a few of the things I found.

I began working from the top of this record list and making my way down. The first box was largely unconnected to the HA, save for one folder of sketches about a planned addition. That was very interesting to me, because I’ve noticed in comparing photos of the Albert that there was an addition on the south wing of the complex, but the available photos were so widely spaced in time that I couldn’t figure out when it happened. The 1958 sketch shows the addition already in place, so that helps a tiny bit.

The second oversized box contained Hotel registration pages from the mid-1920s, which had some lovely penmanship but wasn’t of immediate interest to me. I wanted and had been promised floor plans! The ‘normal’ sized boxes produced far more of substance, and I’ve only gotten halfway through an even cursory examination of them. There are a lot of financial statements which I didn’t want to commit time to studying before I did a proper survey of the contents in general.

Of immediate interest were:

• A 130 page letter from a former manager of the Hotel Albert detailing staff and personal drama during his tenure. While this was interesting enough in itself — it could easily be a novel, if I can find a floor plan for the first floor I might be tempted at something for my own amusement! — it did shed light into Hotel operations. I learned, for instance, that the Hotel Albert was a company that only ran the hotel operation, and in fact paid the Albert Hotel Company rent. The AHC company which owned the land and building derived rents from the hotel and shops using space on the ground floor, like the barbershop and Sue’s Beauty Shop. This meant that the hotel manager had no real control over the shops on the ground floor, even forcing the renters to spray themselves properly for bugs.
  
• I saw and copied two flyers from ’63 when the hotel was being threatened with demolition and auction. This eventually happened in ’68, but the flyers have some good detail of interiors. Unfortunately, ADAR didn’t have a publicly available scanner, so I had to make do with phone shots — for now.
  
• There was also extensive correspondence between members of the Albert Hotel Company board and their financial agents in Tennessee, one of which declared that the hotel had become a running loss and that only rents from the first-floor shops saved the AHC itself from losing money.

Here’s a visual sample of some of what I spent ~ six hours studying.