Picture two earlier hotels named Galt House, raised in 1835 and 1869, whose name this 1972 tower carries on in Louisville, Kentucky. Its name reaches back to two consecutive nearby historic hotels, both called the Galt House, erected in 1835 and 1869; the first was destroyed by fire in 1865 and the second was demolished in 1921. The namesake began as the residence of Dr. William Craig Galt at the corner of Second and Main Street.
In 1835 the first Galt House, a 60-room hotel built on land purchased from Galt, opened at the northeast corner of Second and Main under Col. Ariss Throckmorton, and came to be acclaimed as Louisville’s finest hotel. Charles Dickens called it "a splendid hotel" and said they were "handsomely lodged as though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond the Alleghenies. During the Civil War the Galt House hosted meetings of Union generals, and in September 1862 it was the scene of an unusual murder.
Today you stand at the city’s only hotel on the Ohio River, where these names and stories fold into the riverfront. Notice the Ohio River meeting the streets that lead down to it.