To spot the Lassen Hotel, look for the big, elegant, red-brick building on the corner with eleven rows of windows and a beautifully decorated top floor that catches the sunlight-right across from the intersection.
Now, let’s dive into the story swirling around this old beauty. Imagine yourself on the streets of Wichita in 1918-cars buzzing by and everyone craning their necks to gaze up at the stunning new Lassen Hotel, the tallest thing around. Designed by the clever minds of Richards, McCarty & Bulford, this place was the hotspot, and those upper floors originally formed an L-shape, which made guests feel like they were in on a secret. Just four years later, they said, “Let’s go all in!” and stretched it into a grand U-shaped hotel, making room for even more stories-both real and whispered.
In 1942 the hotel put on a new name tag under the Schimmel Hotel group. If you came in the 1950s, you might’ve tripped over cables and caught the whiff of broadcast excitement because KTVH, the very first TV station in Wichita, bounced into the building-a little sneaky, calling itself a Wichita station and annoying its rivals so much, they dragged the argument to the FCC. No luck: KTVH stuck around until 1956 before moving on.
From fancy hotel days to “Lassen Motor Hotel,” then to Radisson, and later a retirement home with a big Christian mission, this building has reinvented itself more times than your grandma’s meatloaf recipe. There’s even a famous court case tied to it! In the 1980s, the walls echoed with office chatter instead of hotel guests, until 2015-then just silence, as the dreams of apartments hung in midair. But wait! Just in October 2024, news spread that it’ll become Market Centre Apartments, finally bringing new life, laughs, and maybe the occasional “Did you know…?” to this corner of Wichita. If only the building could tell us its favorite era!
