The story
I've walked past the Jefferson Hotel more times than I can count: the grand old building on Franklin Street, downtown. And I never knew that for decades it had alligators living inside. Real ones.
They lived in marble pools inside the hotel. Opera stars stopped to watch them. Some mornings, the story goes, the staff found one asleep on the lobby chairs. And one night in 1919, according to a Richmond newspaper, one of them swallowed another one whole. It didn't stay swallowed.
The Jefferson
To see how alligators ended up in Richmond's fanciest hotel, you have to start with the man who built it. Lewis Ginter had made a fortune in tobacco, and according to the hotel's 1968 National Register nomination, he told his architects to give Richmond the finest hotel in America.
The Jefferson opened on Halloween, 1895. The nomination describes 342 rooms with electric light, steam heat, and hot and cold running water. (The hotel's own history counts 308 of those as guest rooms and 34 as rooms for staff.) Six years later, in 1901, a fire caused by a faulty wire destroyed about three-fifths of the building. Part of it reopened the next year, but it took until May 1907 to bring the whole hotel back.
The hotel also sat right on the route home for travelers coming up from Florida, and that turns out to matter.
How the alligators came
Back then, a baby alligator was a popular Florida souvenir. The trouble is, baby alligators grow. The hotel's own history says Richmonders and guests gave it pet alligators that had outgrown their sinks and bathtubs. According to The Valentine, Richmond's history museum, it wasn't unusual for travelers to leave theirs behind when they checked out.
The alligators went into the marble pools of the Palm Court, the Franklin Street lobby. Paul Herbert, who wrote a book on the hotel's history, says there were two: "one for the big ones and one for the babies."
Nobody seems to know exactly when the first one arrived. Herbert has said it started when the hotel opened; Historic Hotels of America puts it around the 1907 reopening. What is on paper is that by the 1910s, they were famous enough to make the newspapers.
In November 1912, when the opera singer Marcella Sembrich spent a quiet Sunday at the Jefferson, the Richmond Virginian noted that she passed part of the afternoon wandering the hotel, watching the alligators and bowing to the hotel's marble statue of Thomas Jefferson. Earlier that year, a headline in the same paper said the alligators delighted another opera star, Luisa Tetrazzini, who found them very odd.
And in 1917, the paper's travelers' column joked that the hotel's manager had made "a very flattering offer" for three alligators a typewriter salesman had brought home from a convention in Savannah. The salesman said no. He wanted a show of his own.
Peter, 1919
Which brings us to that night.
In January 1919, the Richmond Virginian reported that several of the alligators had recently slipped out of their tank one night through a hole in the screen. Among them was Peter. The paper called him the oldest alligator, one who'd lived in Richmond about ten years, and said that high living and little exercise had made him so fat he was almost too large for his tank.
Peter was waddling around one of the marble pillars of the lobby, the paper said, when he met a much smaller alligator, scarcely a foot long. And he swallowed it whole.
For about ten minutes, by the paper's account, Peter ran around the lobby, lashing his tail so hard that he knocked over a palm plant. That got a porter's attention, and the porter put him back in his tank. Then Peter opened his mouth, and the little one climbed right back out, unharmed: "like a second Jonah," as the paper put it.
It's worth knowing how the paper framed it. It called this a reptile story and said the hotel's doorkeeper vouched for it, so take it the way Richmond probably did, with a smile. It is a newspaper story from the time, not a proven event, and the paper says only that it happened "recently," so the exact night isn't known. But it tells you something. These weren't decorations. They had names, and they got around.
The stories
The stories kept coming, and they aren't all equally solid.
The most famous alligator was Old Pompey, eight feet long or more. Historic Hotels of America says staff would come in some mornings and find him draped across several lobby chairs, and a witness in Herbert's book describes him crawling out of the pond to sleep in a chair. That is a story told by the hotel's historians, not something reported at the time.
Then there is the older lady in the library who mistook an alligator for a footstool, until it moved. Historic Hotels of America, telling the hotel's history, calls that one "apocryphal," which is a polite way of saying probably not. It belongs in the folklore column, and the hotel's own history page doesn't tell it.
One account is in writing. Years later, the actor David Niven wrote in his memoir, The Moon's a Balloon, about a road trip south to Florida he took as a young man, before he was famous. The first stop was Richmond. Signing the hotel register, he noticed, as he put it, "a full-sized alligator in a small pool about six feet from the reception desk."
He never names the hotel in the book; a search of its text turns up no "Jefferson." But no other Richmond hotel is known for alligators in its pools, so it's hard to picture it being anywhere else. The book doesn't date the trip either. It falls in the pages before Niven first mentions 1934.
What happened to them
By the hotel's account, the last of them, Old Pompey, died in 1948. One account, a 2013 article drawing on Herbert, puts Pompey's death in 1936 and says only that the last alligator died in 1948. No newspaper notice of his death has turned up to settle it. Either way, the pools went quiet.
But that wasn't quite the end. According to The Valentine, citing the Richmond News Leader of October 17, 1964, a University of Richmond fraternity, Lambda Chi, donated three new alligators that year to bring the tradition back. Two more came later. We haven't read that 1964 article ourselves, only The Valentine's account of it. And no one seems to know when those last alligators left.
The hotel had harder years ahead. A fire in 1944 killed six people. By 1980 the Jefferson had closed, and by the hotel's account it came close to being torn down for a new Federal Reserve bank. Investors won it instead, and it reopened restored on May 6, 1986.
And somebody there remembered the alligators.
Seeing it today
The Jefferson is a working hotel. Today bronze alligators greet you out front, by the Franklin Street entrance, and a bronze Old Pompey waits by the valet stand. The Valentine credits the alligator bronzes to the sculptor Paul Jeffries, from the 1980s renovation.
Inside, in the Palm Court, the life-size marble Thomas Jefferson by the Richmond sculptor Edward V. Valentine is still there: the same statue Marcella Sembrich bowed to in 1912, while she watched the alligators.
I must have walked past them a hundred times. So the next time you're on Franklin Street, look a little closer. Some of Richmond's strangest history is sitting right there by the door. Watch the film above.
Sources
- The Jefferson Hotel, "History"
- Historic Hotels of America, The Jefferson Hotel, "History Mystery"
- The Valentine, "Alligators: The Invasion of the Jefferson Hotel" (2024), citing the Richmond News Leader, Oct. 17, 1964
- Virginia Department of Historic Resources, National Register nomination, Jefferson Hotel (127-0001, 1968)
- The Richmond Virginian, Feb. 15, 1912, p. 5 (Tetrazzini), via Chronicling America, Library of Congress
- The Richmond Virginian, Nov. 11, 1912, p. 7 (Sembrich), via Chronicling America, Library of Congress
- The Richmond Virginian, July 8, 1917, p. 21 (the Savannah alligators), via Chronicling America, Library of Congress
- The Richmond Virginian, Jan. 19, 1919, p. 4 (Peter), via Chronicling America, Library of Congress
- David Niven, The Moon's a Balloon (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972 US edition), Internet Archive
- Mike Welton, "Richmond's Jefferson Hotel: A History" (2013), quoting Paul Herbert, via US Modernist
Credits
Poster: Japanese Palm Garden, Jefferson Hotel, Detroit Publishing Co. postcard (1908–09), The New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Images in the film: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Co. photographs of the Jefferson Hotel (c. 1900–1920), a stereograph of a hotel corridor (c. 1900), Detroit Publishing Co. alligator photographs from Florida (c. 1900–01), a Whitney's Alligator Farm advertising card (1906) and the Historic American Buildings Survey, Jefferson Hotel (HABS VA-840, 1969); Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Map Company, Richmond, 1905, sheet 89; Library of Congress, Chronicling America, the Richmond Virginian (1912, 1917, 1919) and the Richmond Dispatch (Mar. 30, 1901). Detroit Publishing Co. postcards, 1902–1910s: The New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Palm Court postcard: VCU Libraries, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Lewis Ginter portrait: VCU Libraries, James Branch Cabell Library, Special Collections and Archives, CC BY 2.0. Tichnor Bros. postcard: Boston Public Library, Tichnor Brothers Collection, CC BY 2.0. Photos by Ron Cogswell (2013) and schizoform (2024), CC BY 2.0, via Flickr. Jefferson Hotel (2007), by Mentes, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The illustrations of the 1919 newspaper story and the route map were made for the film. Original score.