Hotel Breakers

Aerial view of Hotel Breakers with the rotunda at the center, 1985.

NPS Photo

Hotel Breakers

Sandusky, OH

Designated an NHL: February 27, 1987

Designation withdrawn: August 7, 2001

The Hotel Breakers was constructed in 1905 during the 'golden age' of resort hotels in the United States. Designed in a French country Chateau-style, the Breakers was oriented towards Lake Erie and featured a five-story rotunda with eight three-story wings. An additional wing was added in 1924; the Breakers then covered eight acres. Typical of resort hotels of its time, it also featured extensive landscaping with ornate flower gardens. Resort hotels of the time were often built near natural and scenic wonders, or in the case of the Breakers and similar establishments, linked to amusement and entertainment centers. These hotels were large, opulent, and offered a variety of activities under one roof.

The Hotel Breakers was conceived and built by George A. Boeckling, an Indiana entrepreneur who was one of the great amusement park and resort developers of the early twentieth century. Cedar Point had been a small resort as early as the 1860s, but after Boeckling purchased it in 1897, he turned it into a Midwest showplace. The architectural partners William Knox and John Elliott of Cleveland designed the large frame Hotel Breakers, which became one of the main attractions of the Cedar Point Amusement Park.

The Breakers Towers addition, left, looms over one of the original wings of the Hotel Breakers to the right, 1999.

NPS Photo / Carol Ahlgren, National Historic Landmarks Program

Boeckling was an impresario who brought many stars of the New York Metropolitan Opera to sing at the Breakers while on their summer tours of Chicago. During the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, the Breakers was a top gathering place for many famous people, including John Philip Sousa, and six U.S. Presidents. The Breakers even entered literature, for another guest, the American writer Sherwood Anderson, used Cedar Point and its great hotel as a setting for some of his short stories. Boeckling died in 1931 and the financial and physical condition of the hotel declined dramatically during the next three decades. In 1960, in an attempt to emulate Disneyland, new park managers introduced new rides and restored old ones. The park's attendance increased in the 1960s and 1970s and the Hotel Breakers still operates as a major resort destination at the greatly expanded Cedar Point Amusement Park.

The Hotel Breakers was designated a National Historic Landmark on March 9, 1987. In recent years, significant alterations have been made to the hotel. Original wings have been demolished, windows have been replaced and faux balconies added. The exterior integrity has been further compromised by the application of synthetic stucco panels. Although the five-story rotunda of the hotel has retained its original interior woodwork, windows, and clapboard siding, it is almost completely overwhelmed by the scale and the massing of the other alterations. The spatial and visual relationship of the rotunda and the remaining original wings of the hotel was compromised by the 1998 addition of a ten-story building called Breakers Towers, in the midst of the hotel complex.

Original rotunda and wings of Hotel Breakers, with five- and ten-story additions to the right.

NPS Photo / Carol Ahlgren, National Historic Landmarks Program

The Landmark designation of Hotel Breakers was withdrawn on August 7, 2001, as the property no longer retained integrity of scale, massing, and materials. The fate of Hotel Breakers and its Landmark status illustrates an important point; designation of a property as a National Historic Landmark does not restrict the manner in which the property may be used or altered by a private owner.