The first large residential building to be part of Allentown's west end development was the Traylor Hotel, operated on the temperance plan. The sumptuously appointed building was the product of Samuel Traylor, founder of Traylor Engineering, one of Allentown's most important industrial plants. It began as a six-story, red brick, U-shaped structure with white stone trim, to which a 1929 addition made the building an E shape. Traylor had a private entrance on 15th Street to his family's apartment. The Traylor Parking Garage (demolished), one block to the southwest, was finished first, in 1916, making the hotel in its early accommodation of the automobile one of the most modern residential buildings in the nation. Despite claims by boosters of the Americus Hotel (
LH3) when it was completed in 1927, many still regarded the decade-old Traylor as the city's “class hotel.” A roof garden was lushly adorned with ferns and palms. By the end of the 1920s, the sixth-floor banquet room had been decorated in the latest fashion in the manner of an ocean liner and was dubbed the “S.S. Traylor.” The imposing building still contains apartments, though it has not fared as well as the Livingston (
LH11) across the street.