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Bobbie Grant
Congratulations
employee of the month
Ms. Grant is a wonderful example of the glue that holds the Bistro together. People line up for
her cooking and it is always delivered with a smile. She loves her job and always goes above and
beyond by remembering exactly what both residents and employees like to eat, even before they
order.
- Mark Simpson, Director of Dining Services
• 8 •
The Pinecone
|
December 2016
The History of the Peabody Hotel and Its Famous Ducks
The original Peabody Hotel was built in 1869 at the corner of Main and Monroe by Robert Campbell
Brinkley, who named it to honor his friend, the recently deceased George Peabody, for his contributions
to the South. The hotel was a huge success, and Brinkley gave it to his daughter Anna Overton Brinkley
and her husband Robert B. Snowden as a wedding gift not long after it opened. The hotel had 75 rooms,
with private bathrooms, and numerous elegant public rooms. Among its guests were Presidents Andrew
Johnson and William McKinley and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, lived there in 1870 when he worked as president
of an insurance company. The hotel closed in 1923 in preparation for a move one block away. The
building was demolished and Lowenstein’s department store was constructed there.
The current Peabody Hotel building, on Union Avenue, is an Italian Renaissance structure designed by
noted Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager. Construction began less than a month after the old hotel
closed. The new hotel was built on the previous site of the Fransioli Hotel, a structure which looked
nearly identical to the original Peabody Hotel. The new hotel opened on September 1, 1925.
The hotel was sold to the Alsonett Hotel Group in 1953. Deeply in debt by the early 1960s, it went
bankrupt in 1965 and was sold in a foreclosure auction to Sheraton Hotels. It became the Sheraton-
Peabody Hotel.
As downtown Memphis decayed in the early 1970s, the hotel suffered financially, and the Sheraton-
Peabody closed in December 1973. An Alabama investment group purchased the hotel in 1974 and
reopened it briefly under its original name, but they declared bankruptcy on April 1, 1975 and it closed
again. Isadore Edwin Hanover purchased the hotel from the county on July 31, 1975 for $400,000 and
sold it to his son-in-law, Jack A. Belz, for the same amount. Belz spent the next several years and $25
million renovating the landmark structure. The grand reopening in 1981 is widely considered a major
catalyst for the Memphis downtown area’s ongoing revitalization. The Peabody Hotel is listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
The Peabody is probably best known for a custom dating back to the 1930s. The General Manager of the
time, Frank Schutt, had just returned from a weekend hunting trip in Arkansas. He and his friends found
it amusing to leave three of their live English Call Duck decoys in the hotel fountain. The guests loved the
idea, and since then, five Mallard ducks (one drake and four hens) have played in the fountain every day.
In 1940, a Bellman by the name of Edward Pembroke volunteered to care for the ducks. Pembroke was
given the position of “Duckmaster” and served in that position until 1991. As a former circus animal
trainer, he taught the ducks to march into the hotel lobby, which started the famous Peabody Duck March.
Every day at 11:00 a.m., the Peabody Ducks are escorted from their penthouse home, on the Plantation
Roof, to the lobby via elevator. The ducks, accompanied by the King Cotton March by John Philip Sousa,
then proceed across a red carpet to the hotel fountain, made of a solid block of Italian travertine marble.
The ducks are then ceremoniously led back to their penthouse at 5:00 p.m.
The custom of keeping ducks in the lobby fountain may date back even further than the 1930s. A pre-
1915 postcard highlights the ducks playing in the fountain, and one source claims the custom goes back
to the hotel’s opening in 1869. However, the Peabody itself claims the duck tradition to have started in
1933, as on December 3, 2008 they unveiled a new “Duck Palace” located on the rooftop, for the 75th
anniversary of the duck tradition. The 24 by 12 foot enclosure features granite flooring, ceiling fans, a
scale replica of the hotel, a fountain decorated with a pair of bronze ducks, and a large viewing window
for guests to see them in their new home. The Duck Palace cost approximately $200,000 to construct.