Union House Hotel

Date of Construction: 1883 with additions to 1922.

Architectural Style: Commercial Vernacular.

The Union House Hotel is the oldest continuously operated hotel in the area. The hotel was begun just one year after a catastrophic fire destroyed almost all the older commercial buildings on Broadway. The 1882 fire consumed three of the city’s more recent hotels, creating a demand for modern lodging that led Nicholas and Susan Altmayer to construct what began as a modest two-story hotel. Two years later, in 1885, the Altmayers doubled the size of the building. In 1903, their son Fred added a third story. August and Antonia Maternoski purchased the hotel in 1918. They razed the hotel’s original horse barn and replaced it with the present brick barn. A small three-story addition that the Maternoskis added to the east end of the James Street side of the hotel in 1922 resulted in a thirty-four room hotel building.

The Union Hotel and Restaurant continues to operate as a family-owned hotel, supper club, and lounge that is in the heart of De Pere, now owned by a Maternoski great-grandson McKim Boyd. Inside is a comfortable, well-maintained interior with public spaces on the first floor and hotel rooms above.

The entrance lobby, bar, and dining booths display a sleek, streamlined Art Moderne appearance from a 1936-37 remodeling, one of the few changes since the building’s 1922 completion.

The horse barn was built to stable guest horses and horses for an adjacent fire department that no longer exists.