The Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells

It was not long after I arrived in Texas that I was exploring the area west of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, when I saw a HUGE building looming in the distance as I approached the town of Mineral Wells.

This HUGE building looked so out of place, towering above the small town which looked like it had fallen on hard times.

I can not remember now how it was I learned this HUGE building was the Baker Hotel. I know I discovered the Baker Hotel late in the last century, before Googling made it easy to find information.

After I began my Eyes on Texas website I returned to Mineral Wells to take more photos of the Baker  Hotel. On one of my visits a custodian let me inside to explore the first floor. By then the Baker had been stripped of most of anything valuable, but you could still see signs of its glory days, like the art deco style floor pointing arrow above the elevator door. And what looked like pink tinted mirrors in the ballroom. Why those mirrors were still there seemed to be yet one more Baker Hotel mystery.

When I made a Baker Hotel webpage it was the only webpage devoted to this subject on the Internet. That is no longer the case.

Earlier in this century I would frequently get inquiries about the Baker Hotel from people thinking I somehow had a direct involvement with the building. Over the years there have been multiple instances of someone having a plan to restore the Baker Hotel to its former glory. Some of these plans seem well grounded, generating news coverage.

And then nothing seems to happen and the Baker Hotel remains in its state of gradual decay.