A leaking toilet in the Hotel Pattee’s Chautauqua Room 316 went undiscovered for several hours last week, causing significant damage to the room and the one below it, the Chinese Room 216, as well as harming the Ned Willis Library and the seating area of the Interurban Lounge.
In all, six rooms sustained damage in the 100-year-old Perry landmark, but the hard-working Hartzes had these reduced to two in short order.
“It was quite a mess,” said Denise Hartz, owner of the hotel with her husband, Jay Hartz. “It’s been a long couple of days.” The leakage was discovered March 30.
Hartz said the flooring in the Chautauqua Room was ruined, and the ceiling and floors in the room below it were also badly damaged. She said a local cleanup and repair company was called in for the mop-up operation.
“It was 95 degrees in there while it was drying out,” she said. Holes were drilled in some walls and floors, she said, and wallpaper was painstakingly separated from surfaces in an effort to preserve as much of the original decor as possible.
Master woodworker Joe Warnock of rural Perry will repair the wood floor of the library, Hartz said.
The boutique hotel was restored and remodeled in the mid-1990s, when about $10 million was invested in the building by Perry native Roberta Green Ahmanson and her husband, Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., heir to the Home Savings bank fortune.
