The Daniel Boone Hotel was conceived in the boom years of the late 1920s, when Charleston was growing fast on chemical and coal money. The Kanawha River front had filled in with industry. Downtown was lengthening up Capitol Street and the new state capitol building was about to open three blocks east. The hotel was meant to anchor the city's civic core. The architect, William Lee Stoddart, was a New York-based specialist in hotels. Most of his commissions were in growing cities of the South and the lower Midwest. He gave Charleston the standard Stoddart treatment: a tripartite facade in the style architects of the era called 'skyscraper classicism.' The two-story base with its mezzanine reads like a Greek temple grafted onto the bottom of a tower. Five stories of single-pane windows form the shaft. The tenth-story 'capital' carries diamond-patterned brick and a terra cotta balustrade like a cornice. The plan is U-shaped, with the open court facing the rear of the lot to give interior rooms a light well.

In its decades as a hotel, the Daniel Boone was where things happened. The grand ballroom hosted political conventions, debutante balls, and inaugural dances. Three parlor meeting rooms accommodated smaller affairs. The coffee shop drew the breakfast trade of state legislators and lobbyists during the legislative session. The lobby - tall ceilings, marble columns, mezzanine balconies looking down on the registration desk - was the kind of room where you could sit and watch the entire civic ecosystem of a state capital pass through over the course of a morning. Two major expansions, in 1936 and 1949, brought the total room count to 465 and reflected the postwar growth of business travel. By the early 1960s, the Daniel Boone was the dominant hotel in Charleston, with competition mostly from smaller properties along the river and on the city's outskirts.

The decline came gradually. By the 1970s, business travel had shifted to newer hotels along the interstate highways and out near the airport. Downtown hotels of the Daniel Boone's vintage struggled across the country - too much square footage, too many small rooms, too few elevators, too much capital required to modernize the plumbing and HVAC. Many were demolished. The Daniel Boone took a different path. In the early 1980s, the building was extensively renovated and converted to office use. The conversion preserved the exterior intact while gutting much of the interior - hotel rooms became cubicles, the ballroom was reconfigured, the lobby retained but reduced. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. The Stoddart facade is still on the National Register; the offices behind it continue to house state government and private tenants. Charleston no longer has the grand downtown hotel it built in 1929, but it still has the building.

Walk down Capitol Street today and the Daniel Boone is hard to miss - a ten-story rectangular block among taller modern neighbors, distinctive for its blond brick and the careful terra cotta detailing at the cornice. The arched windows of the base look out on the same sidewalk they have since 1929. The columns at the entrance are still there, though the doors now lead to office tenants rather than to a registration desk and a bellman. Inside, the bones of the original hotel are still detectable in the floor plans and corridor layouts, if you know where to look. The building is a piece of a downtown that has changed character several times in its history - boom, decline, partial recovery - and the Daniel Boone has outlasted all of it. The frontiersman it was named for never came to Charleston. The hotel that bears his name has been there for the better part of a century.