Hampton Inn Majestic Chicago Theatre District

The Hotel Built Inside Chicago's Answer to the Iroquois Fire

Every Hampton Inn promises the same reliable room. Almost none of them sit on top of a working Broadway theatre that was built, in 1906, specifically so Chicago would never repeat the Iroquois fire. The Majestic Building went up three years after that disaster killed more than 600 people a few blocks away, and architects Edmund R. Krause and Rapp & Rapp designed its ground-floor playhouse around the lesson: wide exits, fireproof construction, a stage built to contain rather than feed a blaze. The theatre opened as the Majestic, ran vaudeville through the Orpheum Circuit into the 1920s, and the hotel that now occupies its upper floors inherited both the name and the address.

Why It Works

We chose this hotel for the thing it cannot advertise convincingly on its own booking page: a piece of Chicago theatre history sitting directly under the guest-room floors, still in daily use. The CIBC Theatre — the Majestic's current name, after a run as the LaSalle Bank, Bank of America and PrivateBank Theatre — still plays eight shows a week, and Broadway In Chicago has run it since 2000. A $20 million, eighteen-month renovation in 2006 and 2007 turned the building's long-vacant upper stories into 135 rooms without touching the theatre below, so the marquee out front is doing exactly what it did in 1906. That is a sharper story than most mid-range Loop hotels can tell, and it is the reason this one earns a place over otherwise comparable competitors on the same blocks.

Why This Location

Twenty-two West Monroe sits inside the Loop's theatre row, within easy walking distance of Millennium Park and the Art Institute of Chicago, and on the same stretch of State and Monroe that carries most of the city's remaining historic playhouses. It is a five-minute walk to the Chicago Cultural Center, close enough to Macy's on State Street to use it as a landmark, and inside the Loop's elevated-train ring, which makes every direction of the city reachable without a car. Guests who want a show, a museum afternoon and a train home all in the same few blocks will find the geography does the planning for them.

Fast Facts

• Price: Mid-range, standard Hampton Inn rates for the Loop

• Vibe: Reliable chain comfort inside a landmark theatre building

• Rooms: 135, renovated 2007

• Best For: Theatre-goers, Loop business trips, first-time Chicago visitors who want to walk everywhere

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: The CIBC Theatre marquee at street level, still running the same stage the building was built around

• Dining: Free hot breakfast buffet; no in-house restaurant

• Amenities: Fitness center, business center, valet parking, pet-friendly rooms

• Attractions: Millennium Park, the Art Institute, State Street shopping, the Chicago Cultural Center — all within a few blocks

A Vaudeville House, Reimagined Upward

The Majestic's early run reads like a short history of American popular entertainment: a high-end stop on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit through the 1920s, closed during the Depression in 1932, bought by the Shubert Organization in 1945 and reopened as the Sam Shubert Theatre, then passed to the Nederlander Organization in 1991, which still owns the building today. Interior designer Laurie Miller, who led the hotel's 2007 fit-out, built the guest floors around that theatrical pedigree rather than against it — the result leans toward the plush and the dramatic rather than the generic business-hotel palette, even if it stops short of calling itself a boutique property.

Before You Book

This is a Hampton Inn first and a historic building second: the rooms are comfortable and predictable rather than distinctive, and travelers chasing design-forward interiors should look elsewhere in the Loop. Valet parking runs extra and there is no self-parking option, which matters in a neighborhood where a rental car is rarely worth the hassle anyway. What this address buys instead is proximity — to a working Broadway stage, to the museum campus, to the trains — at a price well below the design hotels competing for the same corner.