In 1968, ground broke in Salem with the construction of the proposed Tower Inn, a 10-story tall structure that dwarfed the rest of the town and was at the time the tallest building between St. Louis and Springfield. This structure brought big names to a small town, and provided shelter to many people over the years of its operation. Today, a new structure stands in its place, but the history of the building and what it brought to Salem still remains.
The Tower Inn became a reality because of one man, Martin M. Hart. Hart, a local medical practitioner at the time, had an interesting curiosity in owning a building of this magnitude.
“My dad made a good living in his medical practice,” said Martin D. Hart, son of the owner. “He did not ever buy stocks or bonds, but he always liked real estate. He had a good friend named Bill Boleman who built and developed restaurants and hotels in Florida, Columbia and Kansas City. My dad and he were good, close friends, and Bill built a 10-story high rise building in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida. My dad went down there and watched it being built. He had a little money and said ‘Well, I’d like to do one of those myself in Salem.’”
And build it he did. The construction for the building began in July of 1968, which took two years to fully complete. The first guests the Tower Inn welcomed arrived in 1970, with some big-ticket names making stops in Salem from there until its closing in 1996.
“We had a lot of convention business over the years,” Hart said. “Thomas Eagleton stayed there, John Ashcroft spoke there, we had Barbara Fairchild there at one time and Bobby Bare… this was over a long period of time, though.”
The building was not solely a hotel. The first floor featured a restaurant and meeting room for conventions and conferences. There were 58 hotel rooms, the 10th floor held even more meeting rooms and guest rooms, and in the basement was a bar.
“This was before liquor by the drink was available in Salem,” he explained. “Later on, when we put in liquor by the drink, we circumvented the city and the county, and the state passed the law (that we could) get a permit from them. It turned a lot of people off, but it also brought a lot of business to Salem, too.”
So why, exactly, did Hart’s father decide to build the Tower Inn in Salem to begin with? Hart knows it was because Salem was his father’s home.
“He was born here and died here,” Hart said. “He never left, except when he was in the service. He went to school in St. Louis for a few years, but he graduated from Salem High School in the early 30’s, went to medical school at St. Louis University, but he never went anywhere else to practice medicine. He always practiced here with his grandfather, and later by himself.”
Martin D. Hart called the Tower Inn his place of employment since he was 24 years old.
“I was a manager there for a while on the hotel side of it,” he said. “I inspected the rooms, did the capital improvements… just took care of the place. I’m an accountant by trade so we didn’t need to hire anyone for payroll or tax work, which certainly was a savings.”
Hart explained how at only 55 years old his father died from a heart attack in 1973 while quail hunting on his local farm.
“He was quail hunting at the Meramec River. He was walking along with his wife, my mother, and his two best-friends, Mary and Calvin McIntosh, and just fell over,” he says. “It was very upsetting for our family.”
The Tower Inn then fell into the hands of Hart’s mother, Betty. From then on, the Tower Inn was leased to different owners until its eventual closing.
Martin D. Hart, being an accountant and having worked in the Tower Inn, says that without the subsidies of his father’s other income, the Tower Inn was failing.
“If you were going to go out and borrow the money, retire the debt, meet the operating expenses based on the amount of business that it generated… it would never have paid off,” he said. “He just liked owning this 10-story building. I don’t know if it was so much as an ego thing, or if he just liked owning real estate.”
Hart had other ventures in Salem and beyond, as well. This ranged from other hotels to the Crossroads Shopping Center, and a large family farm north of Salem, where Martin D. Hart now resides.
Archives of newspapers from 50 years ago revealed that during the construction of the Tower Inn, an odd inclusion was used during the digging of a basement: the use of mules. In black-and-white film negatives found in archives of The Salem News, two large mules can be seen hauling dirt out of what would later be the hotel bar. Hart laughed when the photo was mentioned.
“There’s a little background story to that,” he said. “We wouldn’t have had to use any mules, but my dad wanted to do it because he wanted people to talk about it. Now, 50 years later, we’re still talking about it!”
