Connor Hotel

Jerome, Arizona occupies the steep south face of Cleopatra Hill in Yavapai County, built in the late 19th century on the wealth of copper mining. At its peak, the town held 15,000 residents and a reputation for the kind of commerce that follows a mining boom: saloons, hotels, brothels, and the social architecture of a place where people arrived with money and frequently left without it.

David Connor opened his hotel at 164 Main Street in 1898, designing the original building with 20 rooms on the upper floor and a barroom, card rooms, and billiard tables on the ground level. Rates ran $1 per night on the European plan. The building burned twice in Jerome's crowded early years — the town's compressed wooden architecture made fire routine — and Connor was notably positioned to recover both times, holding insurance when most of his neighbors did not.

The hotel closed in 1931, part of Jerome's broader collapse as copper prices fell and the mining economy contracted. The town's population dropped from thousands to dozens. Jerome was declared a ghost town before its revival in the latter 20th century as an arts community and tourism destination.

In 1922, a crime of some notoriety took place in the hotel's ground-floor cafe: Anna Hopkins, wife of the local mining company's chief engineer, threw carbolic acid into the face of a schoolteacher. The circumstances and outcome of the incident appear in accounts of the hotel's history, though detailed records are not available in publicly accessible sources. The event marked the cafe as a location with its own documented history of violence.