The Lytle Park Hotel, Autograph Collection

The Lytle Park Hotel opened in June 2020 at 311 Pike Street, on the southeast corner of Lytle Park. It is Cincinnati's first Autograph Collection hotel and has 106 rooms, 18 of them suites. Western & Southern Financial Group owns the buildings. Planning began in 2014, and an opening planned for March 2020 slipped to June because of the pandemic shutdowns.

The place

Lytle Park is a small green square on the east side of downtown, in one of the oldest parts of the city. The hotel overlooks it from Pike Street.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Taft Museum of Art and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge are the places the hotel names nearby, and Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal is a short drive. Some rooms face the park, others the river.

The concept

The Anna Louise Inn, designed by Garber & Woodward and built in 1909, housed young single women for more than a century. Western & Southern bought it for $4 million from Cincinnati Union Bethel, and the inn moved to Mount Auburn. The neighbouring Earls Building, from 1919 and designed by Dittoe Fahnestock and Ferber, was built as housing for clergy and staff of the inn and the adjacent Christ Church Cathedral, though sources differ on its exact origin and on the spelling of its name.

CR architecture + design led the conversion, reported at more than $35 million, with interiors by ForrestPerkins. The two buildings were joined by a skylit atrium that now covers the main lobby bar. Original details were kept: a Rookwood fountain was restored, and wrought iron railings and leaded glass windows remain. A cobblestone-style drive nods to early twentieth-century construction.

Rooms average more than 450 square feet, with natural stone and burnished metal finishes. The named suites, Lincoln, Taft and Blossom among them, add living areas, and some have wet bars. Cincinnati-themed art hangs in corridors and rooms, including a wall of retro postcards printed on canvas.

Dining & wellness

Subito, on the ground floor, is the main restaurant: Italian cooking with a brick-oven pizza bar, a raw bar and a beer and wine garden, served from breakfast to dinner. Its brass-and-wood bar has a crown of pendant lights and leather half-moon booths.

The rooftop is Vista at Lytle Park, a 5,177-square-foot indoor-outdoor space with retractable windows and its own bar, run largely as an event venue, and the hotel also lists a rooftop fireplace and bar. The Magnolia Room has a terrace for dinners and ceremonies, and the Oak Room is for private dining.