The closed Stratford Inn hotel along the Route 66 corridor of the west St. Louis suburb of Fenton, Missouri, will be demolished by mid-March.
The St. Louis Business Journal, citing a newsletter from Fenton’s mayor, reported the motel, event space and bar along Interstate 44 will be torn down within a few months.
The complex has been closed since 2018.
The owner of the property has commissioned Spirtas Wrecking Co. to tear down the motel, the mayor said, and St. Louis County has approved the demolition permit.
Spirtas was the same company that tore down Route 66’s fabled Coral Court Motel in nearby Marlborough, Missouri.
The Journal passed along this history of the motel:
Originally built as a Ramada Inn along Route 66 in 1964, the 85-room hotel’s restaurant and barm, later called the Stratford Bar and Grill, once attracted a roster of performers that included Ike and Tina Turner, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Count Basie, the Glenn Miller Band and Della Reese, among many others, Michael Scauzzo told the Webster-Kirkwood Times in 2005. Scauzzo was the son of longtime hotel owners Sam and Carol Scauzzo, who purchased the inn in 1992 and sold it to Infinity in 2018.
The Stratford Inn closed in 2018 after local officials found multiple code violations, forcing out about 180 long-term residents.
The hotel suffered a big fire in 2022, and the city declared the structure unsafe months later.
St. Louis Patina wrote an ode to the abandoned hotel shortly after the fire.
(Excerpted Google Street View image from 2018 of the Stratford Inn in Fenton, Missouri)