APPLE GATE INN

A long-awaited submission from Dave Burgess. He did a lot of research into this and his article follows:

"My sources for the following notes are a Warren Tribune article about hotels, published on 10 March 1936 and the article describing the Warren Hotel fire published a few days before. The photo of the Colonial Hotel was found in a vertical file at the County Library on Mahoning Ave. Images of the Gilmore House (next to the Pioneer bldg) and the view of the Warren Hotel exists elsewhere on this Downtown Warren site.

Shown above is the Colonial Hotel, circ 1920, that occupied a lot on the south side of East Market St, between the Union Savings and Trust Building and the Duchess Building.

Starting in 1857, hotel names like Camp, Bentley, Gilmore, Pancoast, Hoyt and Elliott were associated with the first building to occupy this lot. About 1900 the building was replaced by the one above and renamed the New Elliott, soon followed by the Colonial Hotel. The 1932 Warren City Directory reveals that the place was now known as the Warren Hotel.

In April of 1936 a fire on the second floor caused much damage and cost three guests their lives. Two of the fatalities were the result of the guests jumping out of the windows in an attempt to escape the smoke and flames.

A search of the City Directories for 1940/42 does not reveal a hotel at this site, but instead give the indication that the building was then being used as an office building.

While comparing the photo above with one of the Warren Hotel, contained elsewhere on this site, I was concerned about the major differences between the facade of the 2 hotels. Nowhere was there indication that a third building had ever been constructed. But, in the middle of the 1936 Tribune article we find and I quote; “Sometime after the Union Savings and Trust Building was completed in 1926 and other buildings in that section of Market St were compelled to get into line, about eight years ago, (ed 1928) a new front was put on the motel”. This explains the differences and similarities in the two views (Warren vs. Colonial) of the building. The same “get into line” though would also explain the minor changes in the building to the right of the hotels, the Voit Building, which I believe was torn down to make way for a technology annex for the bank

What was the final fate of the hotel building? Joni Mitchell says it best, “They put up a parking lot”.

Clear as mud? Dave Burgess WGH’65"

A directory from 1971, a transitional period for the Quality group, which had changed its name from Quality Courts Motels to Quality Motels in 1969. In 1972, the name was changed again ... this time to Quality Inns.