In the early 1900s, the hotel had a Negro league baseball team, the French Lick Plutos, and until the 1940s French Lick was a venue for spring training for professional baseball teams. The resort was a major employer of African-American labor, which mostly came from Kentucky. Taggart, were its owners and operators, the popular hotel attracted many fashionable, wealthy, and notable guests. During the period 1901 to 1946, when Thomas Taggart, a former mayor of Indianapolis, and his son, Thomas D. The historic hotel in the national historic district at French Lick was initially known as a mineral spring health spa and for its trademarked Pluto Water. The French Lick Springs Hotel, a part of the French Lick Resort complex, is a major resort hotel in Orange County, Indiana. Indiana Landmarks holds a perpetual preservation easement on the West Baden Springs Hotel that requires prior approval to make any changes to the hotel's exterior or grounds, even if ownership changes. The total cost of the complete restoration of the West Baden Springs Hotel totaled almost $100 million. The investors formed a new company that applied for and received the gambling license and, in June of 2007, a gala event marked the reopening of the West Baden Springs Hotel, seventy-five years after it closed. The Trump Organization was initially granted the gambling license by the Indiana Gaming Commission, but Trump's subsequent bankruptcy caused the selection process to begin again. Legislation was finally approved in 2003 and the required local referendum passed. They unsuccessfully marketed the property nationally for more than five years before realizing that casino gaming would be the key to their success. Over the next five years, the group spent another $5 million for maintenance. In addition to the exteriors of the hotel and outbuildings, the garden was recreated, and the interior atrium, lobby, dining room and adjoining rooms were also restored.

The thirty-month first phase of the project was completed in early 1999 at a cost of $30 million, two-and-a-half times their initial commitment. The grand hotel has seen an extensive, and expensive, restoration Visit IndianaĪ couple of Indiana-based historic preservationists initiated efforts to stabilize the hotel's structural integrity and begin exterior restoration during the summer of 1996.

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