Since 1883 every photo or painting of downtown Colorado Springs seems to focus west along Pikes Peak Avenue to include the mountains. And that view has had one other feature, the Antlers Hotel. And what a history it has had.

More than 12 years earlier, Gen. William Jackson Palmer had been pulling together plans for his city and quickly needed a utilitarian — yes, plain and boring — Colorado Springs Hotel for the earliest workers and city builders near the railroad depot. By 1883 it was clear that something much nicer was needed for all the newcomers arriving by train, and the first Antlers Hotel was built adjacent to the D&RG railroad depot.

Stepping off the train, arrivals could walk through a landscaped area and right into the lobby of an attractive, west-facing hotel on what is Cascade Avenue.

Cholmondeley Thornton gave Palmer elk and deer antlers from Manitou Park and they became the decorations for the lobby of the new hotel as well as giving it a name, the Antlers. Colorado Springs Hotel across the street was later moved to another location across from what is today the South Nevada Avenue Police Operations Center.

According to the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, the first Antlers Hotel had five floors, 75 guest rooms and amenities like a music room, billiards room, children’s playroom, barber shop and Turkish baths. “Notably for the era, the hotel was furnished with gas lighting, steam heat, and hot and cold running water. It was immediately popular with wealthy tourists and health-seekers.” The dry weather, ample sunshine and nearby mineral waters were a draw for those from elsewhere seeking cures for tuberculosis and smallpox.

Tragedy struck on Oct. 1, 1898. As the Dr. Lester L. Willliams Fire Museum describes: “On that day, fire destroyed the Rio Grande Railroad freight station, about seventy buildings, including three lumberyards, and the original, or first, Antlers Hotel.” Wind was blowing at 47 mph when trash and tumbleweeds under the wood platform of the railroad station caught fire. One of the freight cars carried dynamite and, in another, blasting powder. Crews from another train pulled the dynamite car away but the powder exploded, blowing flaming timber through the area including into small houses south of Colorado Avenue. The hotel was evacuated and then caught fire, burning to the ground by midnight. There were no injuries reported.

The loss of the hotel was $450,000, with $350,000 covered by insurance, according to the fire museum’s records. It was estimated that today’s value would have been $7,000,000.

Contacted in England, Palmer cabled there would be an even grander Antlers Hotel in his “Little London.” As the Pioneers Museum says, that grander hotel was completed. “It was described as the most beautiful, elegantly furnished, and 100% fire-proof hotel in the west.“

On July 2, 1901, the second Antlers Hotel opened on the same site across the west end of downtown. It had Italian Renaissance design and piazzas, European style, was open to the west and majestic views of Pikes Peak, and was filled with Italian marble, a ballroom, velvet drapes, tapestries, mosaic floors, leaded glass and other amenities of the good life for guests and prospective residents. It had 200 rooms.

There were numerous reports of Spencer Penrose determined to buy the Antlers Hotel but he was always turned down and The Broadmoor was his project instead. One oft-repeated tale alleges that Penrose hopped on a horse and trotted through the Antlers’ lobby to make a purchase request, but that story is usually discounted.

Over the years many influential guests spent time at the hotel, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke to a large crowd from a hotel balcony in 1901. High society events and formal attire were routine.

As years went along everything was changing. By the 1960s there was an explosion of suburbia and the longtime and growing resort attraction of Spencer Penrose’s Broadmoor hotel, other hotels were being built and urban renewal was changing the face of the city. The second Antlers Hotel was showing its many years and business dropped; there were changes in owners but its days were over and the second incarnation of the hotel was demolished. Author and historian Leland Feitz had this touching description: “On September 20, 1964, the last guest checked out of the hotel. That night, Falcon Room bandleader, George Marvin, led a tearful group of employees and friends of the hotel in singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the lights went out forever.”

A modern iteration of The Antlers was built on the same site in 1967 accompanied by office towers and a shopping center, even a department store. For the first time the front door to the hotel lobby faced downtown instead of west.

In 1975, the Antlers was operated by the Broadmoor Management Co. and a double-decker London bus took guests between the Antlers and The Broadmoor.

The third Antlers had several owners, there were financial issues and even a foreclosure, and for a time it was the Antlers Hilton.

In 2015 the hotel was purchased by local attorneys and hotel owners Perry R. Sanders Jr. and John Goede, who first proposed changing it into downtown apartments. Instead, they took the hotel through a modernization including increased technology and today it carries the name The Antlers, A Wyndham Hotel.

The hotel’s long history lends itself to unusual stories. No surprise, all the Antlers Hotels and their sprawling buildings have been subject of regularly reported hauntings, tall tales and speculation by visiting ghost hunters. The spooky tales have lively lives today but usually just from being repeated on online travel sites. There are three regular ghostly stories in hotel lore but it’s all up to readers … or guests with photos!

The longest-living tale is a lone fellow with a moustache said to be a regular in one spot in the hotel bar, originally “Judge Baldwin’s Bar” but known now by different names. However, no one has reported the ghostly drinking fellow ordering them to get off his bar stool.

Then there’s the well-dressed woman in a long, white flowing gown floating down the stairs. Usually she’s in a back staircase is the story, but she apparently never approaches people, just floats by.

The third spirit has a sad story. It’s undocumented but says that she was a teen on prom night who committed suicide in one of the rooms in the 1970s. She haunts different rooms, they say.

It’s all just part of an interesting 143-year history.

Third Antlers Hotel, 2013, Gazette file photo