Then and Now:
Hotel Coronado

	THEN: The Hotel Coronado was located on the northeast corner of Main and William. The photo was taken about 1913. (Photo credit: Wichita Public Library Local History Section http://www.wichitaphotos.org/graphics/wpl_wpl2023.jpg)
	The site of the Hotel Coronado is now occupied by a parking lot.

Once the fourth largest hotel in Wichita, the Coronado stood on the northeast corner of South Main and William, just across the street from City Hall (now the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum). The site was on some of William Griffenstein’s former property.

The four story building was officially opened in 1911, with 62 rooms, but it was not finished until 1916, when the Coronado Café was completed on the first floor.

The café was converted into a pharmacy in 1919 when Elric E. Cummings and Arthur Hill bought it. They ran the pharmacy for six years, then sold it to Q.A. Panton. He kept the pharmacy only a year or two and then sold it to Zoe J. Hollabaugh in 1927. Hollabaugh was an Oklahoman, who had opened his first pharmacy in Quinton, Oklahoma. His second was in Ponca City, and it was that pharmacy which he traded for the Coronado Pharmacy.

The renamed Hollabuagh’s Drug Store was kept open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and became a very popular gathering place for night shift airplane workers during WWII. A 1940s photo in Wichita Century, by R.M. "Dick" Long, shows a long line of people outside the drugstore with a caption that says, "Sometimes the lines were for scarce food items… Often they were for the city busses… Lines often formed outside Hollabaugh’s Drug Store at William and Main for tickets to events at the Forum or Lawrence Stadium."

Since Hollabaugh’s "was located across from the Police Station and near both the Eagle and Beacon newspaper offices and the Forum, it became a gathering place for policemen, reporters and entertainers," said Peerless Princess of the Plains.

Hollabuagh had purchased the Coronado Hotel in 1937 and operated both it and the drug store. In 1952 he sold the hotel to Robert S. Brandon, but he continued running the drug store until 1954.

The drug store continued in operation as Hollabaugh’s until it was closed by a fire on Oct. 24, 1964. Its owner, Robert S. Brandon, said it might never open again.

In April 1965, the Hollabaugh Drug Store site was sold to the Wichita Perpetual Building and Loan Association, which had occupied the property to the north since 1916.

In October 1974, Perpetual Building and Loan hired the K. L. Bradburn Company to raze the site to make room for customer parking.