1. Home
2. News
3. Hotel Breakers turns 100

Hotel Breakers turns 100

SANDUSKY - With its private beach and famous guests, many local officials believe Hotel Breakers made Sandusky, in particular the Cedar Point peninsula, the tourist destination it is today.

Before there was the Top Thrill Dragster and Millennium Force, Cedar Point guests were just as excited about the hotel as they were about the amusement park aspect of the resort -- if not more.

"I think that Hotel Breakers sort of put Sandusky on the map, and then with the ballroom, it was top stuff," Sandusky City Commissioner Leroy Sizemore said, recalling how people would line up along the pier track to take a boat to Cedar Point in the 1940s.

Now, celebrating its 100th anniversary this season, the historic 650-room Hotel Breakers is still a destination, but the amusement park side of Cedar Point played a large role in its rebirth, said David Francis, author of "Cedar Point, The Queen of the Watering Places."

"Hotel Breakers was crucial to early Cedar Point because it brought in more money and increased people's stay," he said.

Hotel Breakers opened June 12, 1905, with more than 5,000 visitors coming for the celebration that included Professor Cooks concert band, a popular group of the early 1900s. Room rates were $1-2 per night and meals were 35 cents.

While the hotel has been updated over the years, the original aspects of the lobby and rotunda have largely been maintained. The wooden floor in the rotunda that guests walked across after getting off their boats in the 1900s is still the same.

"It is a neat place to be," said Richard "Hank" Hanck, a 62-year-old bellhop at Hotel Breakers. "It's right on Lake Erie and it is just wonderful."

Hanck, a native of Sandusky, lives in Ocean Springs, Miss., but for the past seven summers has come to work as a bellhop at Hotel Breakers.

"There are people here who have been coming for 60 years straight -- summer after summer," Hanck said.

Francis said in the early days of Hotel Breakers it wasn't uncommon to stay at the hotel and "not bother" to go on the rides at Cedar Point. Even in the 1920s, when Cedar Point had three roller coasters, company officials didn't even mention the coasters in its advertising for the resort. Cedar Point opened 135 years ago.

"Up until the 1950s, it was a summer resort that just happened to have an amusement park on the side," he said.

However, in the 1940s and 1950s Hotel Breakers began to lose its luster as materials for hotel maintenance were hard to come by after World War II.

"I remember the musty smell in the hotel in 1952," Francis said. "The hotel had been going down for 20 years É so we insisted we move to another room."

However, "As Cedar Point got too big to do in one day, people started to stay more than one day, and Cedar Point was turning Hotel Breakers into a destination itself {again}," Francis said.

"You have generations of families returning on a repeat basis," said Wayne Olcott, corporate vice president of resort accommodations. "We receive letters all the time from people who want us to know how long they have been coming."

"Cedar Point is much more than roller coasters," said Erie County Erie County Visitors & Convention Bureau Executive Director Joan Van Offeren. "I have friends and know other people who 'always stay at the Breakers.'"

Van Offeren said tourists will often call and ask about historic places like the Breakers to stay.

According to the National Geographic Travelers and Travel Industry Association of American, 67 percent of American travelers are seeking historic and charming towns and destinations, she said.

Cedar Point spokesman Robin Innes said millions and millions of people have stayed at the Breakers since it opened 100 years ago. Hotel Breakers still sells out, he said.

While the new Breaker Towers was added in 1999, guests still request to stay in the older section, Innes said. The entire hotel has been modernized to include individual bathrooms and air-conditioning.

In addition to the Breakers, Cedar Point has a second hotel on the Cedar Point property and two hotels off property. There are also campgrounds and cottages.

"It is a great destination for a family," Innes said of Breakers. "People like it because they stayed there with their parents."

As a young boy in the 1970s, David Hahner of Pittsburgh used to go every summer to the Hotel Breakers. His family would always spend a day riding the coasters, but they also would spend time enjoying the resort and the beach.

Hahner hasn't stayed at the Hotel Breakers since he was a boy because of the few hundred dollars some of the rooms now cost, but the 43-year-old always visits the lobby during his annual trips to Cedar Point, he said. The presidential suite at the Hotel Breakers costs $1,000 per night.

"It was convenient and how many other hotels have an amusement park right out the front door?" Hahner said of his former stays. "It was nostalgic and the hotel lobby was gorgeous."

FunCoast.com is your online guide to summer fun for Cedar Point, the LakeErie Islands and Sandusky area. Our site offers up-to-date information on area attractions, restaurants, hotels, gasoline prices, ferry schedules, swimming, birding and fishing, along with a complete listing of events happening in the Sandusky/Cedar Point area. To use our Webcam and zoom in on Cedar Point's rollercoasters, go to http://funcam.funcoast.com