Côte d’Azur | Le Negresco
A legend on the famous promenade of Nice, hardly a postcard, a picture in which it does not appear: the Negresco is extraordinary, is hotel, is house of fine arts in many ways, is myth and modernity at the same time.
Here lives on what was already laid out in the roots of the hotel. Its builder Henri Negrescu, the son of a Romanian innkeeper, had come to France at the age of 15, worked his way up on the Côte d’Azur to become the director of the casino in Nice, and was animated by the unshakable will to build a hotel for the wealthiest guests in the world. Together with the architect Édouard Niemans and the financial support of Alexandre Darracqs and De Dion-Boutons (leading entrepreneurs in the automobile industry), he realized this goal and was able to enlist Gustave Eiffel for the construction of the hotel’s picture-perfect dome. On January 08, 1913, the doors opened for the first season of the new hotel and who would come!
From the beginning, the “Negresco” became a center of attraction not only for the rich, but also for artists, actors, politicians and aristocrats. Curious people flocked to admire what had been created, thus laying the foundation for the myth of “Le Negresco”. This foundation stone proved to be so solid that even the turbulence caused by the First World War, during which the hotel served as a military hospital, and the changeable times thereafter did not represent an incurable break for the creation of legends around the hotel. Henri Negrescu himself, however, had to sell his life’s work for financial reasons and died in 1920 without being able to experience the furious resurgence of his dream.
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