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Roswell Hotel

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1928, John N. Marriott. 137 W. Garfield St.

This six-story buff brick slab has a recessed entrance loggia of four scrolled arches with grotesque masks above the square piers. The only other ornament is at the building’s top with a cornice of dentils and triangles and a stone parapet cap decorated in a wave-like design. The hotel’s upper three floors were the headquarters of the infamous border radio impresario and medical charlatan John R. Brinkley, who rose to fame in the late 1920s in Kansas for his goat-gland virility implants and the broadcasts on his radio station. Unable to increase the power of his Kansas station, Brinkley moved to Del Rio and in 1931 built a studio and a three-hundred-foot tower across the Rio Grande in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, powered to transmit as far as New York. It established a precedent for high-powered broadcasts aimed at the United States from Mexico that endured until the 1970s.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Gerald Moorhead et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

BBVA Compass Bank Building (Del Rio National Bank)
Del Rio National Bank Building
Val Verde County Judicial Center (U.S. Post Office and Federal Building)
Val Verde County Courthouse
First United Methodist Church

Citation

Gerald Moorhead et al., "Roswell Hotel", [Del Rio, Texas], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/TX-02-EL15.

Print Source

Buildings of Texas

Buildings of Texas: East, North Central, Panhandle and South Plains, and West, Gerald Moorhead and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019, 427-428.

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