A Room Removed: How Reconstruction Can Restore a Missing Chapter

Sometimes, a small room can tell a much bigger story about a historic building—and challenge us to rethink which parts of its history deserve to be seen.

Toilet Room (1942)

At Hotel de Paris Museum, a room that disappeared decades ago may be making a return. Dating to 1905, the second-floor toilet room represents a chapter of the hotel's story that falls just beyond its officially recognized period of significance of 1875-1900 as documented by the National Register of Historic Places.

Proposed reconstruction of the room raises an important question: How do we preserve a building's history when the story extends beyond the years for which it is best known?  A reconstructed room offers a tangible connection to what came next: the period from 1905 to 1949, when the building's story continued to unfold.

Beyond the National Register Period

A National Register listing identifies the years during which a property attained the importance that qualifies it for recognition. For Hotel de Paris, 1875–1900 provides an essential framework for understanding its association with hotel founder Louis Dupuy and Georgetown's mining-era.

However, this designation does not mean the property's history after 1900 lacks value. The years that followed offer insight into changing uses, evolving expectations of comfort, and adaptations that allowed the hotel to continue serving occupants and guests. Interpreting these developments helps visitors understand Hotel de Paris as more than a preserved remnant of the nineteenth century.

Toilet Room door and transom (2026)

Bringing Back the 1905 Toilet Room

Reconstruction falls within the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties and is defined as "the act or process of depicting, by means of new construction, the form, features, and detailing of a non-surviving site, landscape, building, structure, or object for the purpose of replicating its appearance at a specific period of time and in its historic location. The Reconstruction Standards establish a limited framework for recreating a vanished or non-surviving building with new materials, primarily for interpretive purposes."

Reconstruction will restore a missing feature associated with the property's early twentieth-century history. The return of the toilet room will help visitors visualize how the building functioned starting in 1905 and provides an opportunity to discuss changes made by proprietress Sarah Burkholder in order to promote Hotel de Paris as a health resort.

As with any reconstruction, the work will be grounded in reliable historical documentation and physical evidence (see images above and below). Clearly identifying reconstructed elements also allows visitors to distinguish new work from surviving historic fabric and understand the decisions behind the project.  More than a room, this feature becomes an interpretive resource, connecting the museum's physical spaces with a period that falls outside its currently designated National Register period of significance.

Toilet Room mirror, turned toward wall (2026)

Embracing Multiple Periods in Historic Preservation

Historic preservation professionals increasingly recognize the importance of understanding buildings through multiple periods of use and change, rather than interpreting only one preferred date or architectural appearance.  Later alterations can reveal significant information about evolving social expectations, ownership, and patterns of occupancy.

The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties provides a framework for evaluating preservation decisions. The appropriate treatment depends on a property's significance, surviving materials, available documentation, and preservation objectives. Reconstruction requires particular care because a missing feature must be supported by sufficient evidence to avoid conjecture.  Fortunately, the original 1905 door, transom, mirror, and toilet paper dispenser have survived; in addition, a photographic image of the room before disassembly is in possession of the Denver Public Library.

A multiple-period approach does not require retaining every alteration or reconstructing every lost feature. Instead, it encourages professionals to assess what each period contributes and how its significance can be communicated responsibly.  The toilet room demonstrates how interpreting a feature from 1905 can complement, rather than compete with, Hotel de Paris's established period of significance.

A Fuller Understanding of Hotel de Paris

A reconstructed toilet room creates an opportunity to connect architectural history with the everyday experiences of people who used the building in the early- to mid-20th century. It also illustrates how museum interpretation can acknowledge a property's evolution without diminishing the period for which it is nationally recognized.

By exploring both its nineteenth-century significance and the developments of 1905–1949, Hotel de Paris Museum can offer visitors a richer understanding of the building and the generations that shaped it.

Historic preservation is not simply about returning a building to one moment in time. It is about using evidence, thoughtful interpretation, and careful stewardship to make its history more fully understood.

Beyond Architectural Significance: Understanding the Value of Louis Dupuy's Hotel de Paris

Louis Dupuy’s Hotel de Paris has attracted differing assessments of its architectural character and historic importance. One preservation architect described the building as “architecturally insignificant.”

Hotel de Paris Museum 
Photograph by Gary Haines, Grizzly Creek Gallery

That observation raises a useful question for historic preservation: How should the value of a historic place be understood when its architectural qualities are only one part of its story?

Hotel de Paris Museum provides an instructive case. The site's significance rests not only in the building itself, but also in its association with Louis Dupuy, Georgetown's development, and the remarkable collection of historic furnishings preserved within it.

Not Simply a Building

Dupuy, known as the Best Cook in the Colorado Territory, transformed a former bakery into a hotel and restaurant that became part of Georgetown's commercial and social life during its silver mining heyday. The property connects several aspects of that history, including immigration, entrepreneurship, hospitality, and the development of a Colorado mining community.  The site's historical status reflects this broader context. Hotel de Paris is included within the Georgetown–Silver Plume National Historic Landmark District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and serves as a Site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Historic Integrity

The property's surviving interiors and collection of furnishings and other associated items add another dimension to the property's value.  Rooms, decorative elements, books, furnishings, artworks, and other objects provide direct material evidence of how a 19th-century hotel operated and was experienced. The survival of thousands of items allows the property to be studied and interpreted as a historical environment rather than solely as an architectural artifact.

A Multidisciplinary Assessment

Preservation architects provide essential expertise concerning construction, materials, workmanship, alterations, integrity, and treatment. Other disciplines address different questions: historians examine people and events; social historians investigate communities and institutions; and curators interpret material culture.

An architectural assessment is therefore one component of a broader evaluation. Categorizing the built environment as unimportant may characterize a particular professional judgment, but it does not encompass the full range of evidence that informs historic preservation decisions.

Considering the Whole Resource

A useful question is: What can this place tell us that would be difficult to recover if it were lost?  At Hotel de Paris, the answer is found in the combination of its physical setting, surviving interiors and objects, and documented associations with Dupuy and Georgetown's mining-era community.

The property's architectural character is part of that record, but it is not the entirety of it.

Historic preservation is ultimately an act of deciding what evidence of the past we are willing to carry forward. Hotel de Paris Museum preserves evidence that cannot be fully reproduced once the place itself is gone: the rooms, objects, spaces, and relationships that connect Louis Dupuy's story to the larger history of the United States.

For that reason, the question is not whether every expert considers the building architecturally exceptional. The more consequential question is whether future generations should have the opportunity to encounter and learn from an unusually intact piece of history.

How A Mining-Camp Bakery Became a Restaurant Legend of the American West

An early Hotel de Paris bill of fare or menu provides a fascinating glimpse of Louis Dupuy’s restaurant during its formative years (1875–1879) when it transitions from Delmonico Bakery to a restaurant within Hotel de Paris. It suggests the establishment was already more sophisticated than an ordinary mining-camp eating house, but its cuisine was not exclusively—or even primarily—French. Rather, Dupuy appears to have combined French culinary training and European standards with hearty American frontier fare.

Bill of Fare, 1870s

This 1870s bill of fare should not be interpreted as the complete expression of Dupuy's cuisine. It is more likely an everyday menu, with special or seasonal dishes appearing when available.

This early version of Louis Dupuy’s menu is especially valuable because it captures the restaurant at the moment when a modest bakery/restaurant operation was becoming more ambitious. The menu also challenges the idea that “French restaurant” did not necessarily mean that every dish was French.

What Does the Bill of Fare Reveal?

 

1. It was an ambitious à la carte public restaurant, not a boarding house serving family-style.  The heading, “ORDER BILL OF FARE,” indicates customers made their choices from various selections. There is an unusually broad range of options for a small Colorado mining town: multiple cuts of beef, veal, mutton, pork, ham, eggs prepared several ways, fried foods, cold cuts, dairy dishes, cakes, toast, coffee, tea, and chocolate.

2. Meat was the centerpiece of the meal.  The menu is extraordinarily meat-heavy and designed for a substantial, protein-rich meal, appropriate to a community of miners, businessmen, and travelers in a high-altitude mining town.  Customers could choose pricey beef such as porterhouse, sirloin, tenderloin steaks, or veal cutlets.  More affordable options were mutton chops or pork steaks.  There is also ham, bacon, sausage, liver with salt pork, pigs' feet, brains, tripe, cold roast beef, cold ham, and tongue.

3. Early on, Dupuy elevated his menu offerings through a variety of preparations by offering onions, mushrooms, and breading for meats.  His menu occupies an interesting middle ground because his ingredients are familiar to Americans, but the preparation reflects Dupuy's European culinary background.

4. The restaurant catered to diverse levels of appetite and pocketbook by offering a significant range of prices. A customer could order a 10¢ (approximately $2.55 USD) serving of wheat cakes, corn cakes, buckwheat cakes, toast, coffee, tea or milk—or spend $1.00 (approximately $25.50 USD) on a porterhouse with mushrooms.  This makes the restaurant seem less like an exclusive luxury establishment and more like a graded dining experience: inexpensive staples for an ordinary customer alongside elaborate and expensive preparations for someone wanting something special.  Particularly revealing, is the 25¢ (approximately $6.37 USD) threshold: orders above 25¢ came with bread, butter and potatoes, making a substantial meal easy to construct.

5. Eggs were an important part of the restaurant's repertoire.  The egg section is surprisingly extensive and includes boiled, fried, scrambled, poached on toast, and a broad range of specialty omelets.  The last group is especially telling. A rum omelet, jelly omelet, and mushroom omelet may go well beyond the basic frontier boarding-house breakfast and demonstrate Dupuy's interest in culinary variety.

6. The absence of game and fish itself is interesting.  The menu has prominent headings for “GAME” and “FISH,” but the surviving image contains no dishes beneath them, which may indicate that those foods were seasonal or market-dependent, rather than consistently available. This is important because later descriptions of Hotel de Paris emphasize wild game and seafood, including oysters.  However, a March 1879 meal served to Jay Gould and other railroad and financial magnates included oysters, sweetbreads, and Peach Charlotte (a warm, baked pudding of stewed fruit and brioche bread with brandy sauce.

 

Birds-eye view of Georgetown, Colorado (1874)

What Kind of Restaurant Was It?

The Hotel de Paris Restaurant Dining Room could be characterized in the period 1875–1879 as a sophisticated European-influenced restaurant operating within a rugged American mining community—combining substantial frontier appetites with the culinary ambitions of a French-trained chef.  It was not yet the fully developed, luxurious Hotel de Paris restaurant that would emerge after the 1878–79 expansion after Dupuy purchased the Powers Building and renovated and expanded the restaurant dining room (christened Louis’) and constructed a new commercial kitchen.

What Kind of Cook Was He?

Louis Dupuy's genius appears to have been Europeanizing the experience of eating, rather than simply importing a French menu. A Georgetown customer could eat steak, pork, ham, eggs, potatoes, and bread—the foods already known—but could have them prepared with mushrooms, onions, sauces, and other techniques associated with more sophisticated cookery.  This helps explain why descriptions could regard the establishment as a first-class French restaurant while its surviving early menu looks remarkably American. Hotel de Paris was, from the beginning, selling quality, choice, refinement and Dupuy's personal culinary expertise, not merely French food.  After 1879, Dupuy offered increasingly elaborate European/French cuisine, fine wines from around the globe, and further developed his reputation as the Best Cook in the Colorado Territory, which attracted wealthy travelers and nationally prominent guests.