Martin Hotel

The Martin took shape on a lawyer's lot. Attorney Richard Kimball had owned the land since 1906 and left its development to Robert Martin, a Black former railroad porter, who opened a steam-heated, fifty-room brick hotel in 1924 on what was then called the Big Nine. In 1933 it became the city's first hotel with a liquor license. After Martin's death in 1936, his niece Mayme Martin, a former teacher, ran it. It closed in 1985 and was demolished within a year; Mayme died in a fire in her rooming-house apartment.

What the plaque says

Martin Hotel 1924-1985 For sixty-one years the Martin Hotel was located at this site. Established in 1924 by Robert Martin with 50 rooms it became the largest African-American hotel in the South. Many celebrities and entertainers such as: Ella Fitzgerald, The Ink Spots, Fats Domino, Mahalia Jackson, J. Ernest Wilkins (Former Assistant Secretary of Labor), Cab Calloway, the Platters, Nat "King" Cole, Lena Horne, Willie Mays, Satchel Paige and the "original" Harlem Globetrotters were guests at the hotel. The Martin Hotel closed November 30, 1985.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — steps away
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 0.8 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.
• Ross's Landing — 0.9 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.
• Walnut Street Bridge — 0.9 mi
  An 1890 truss bridge now open to walkers, and the place where Alfred Blount in 1893 and Ed Johnson in 1906 were lynched, the case that led to the Supreme Court's only criminal trial.

More markers nearby

• First Coca-Cola Bottling Company in the United States — steps away
• Abby Crawford Milton — steps away
• Walden Hospital — 0.2 mi
• William "Uncle Bill" Lewis — 0.3 mi