Cortez Building
El edificio Cortez
Cortez Building
The Cortez Building is located on the northeast corner of North Mesa and Mills Avenue on San Jacinto Plaza in downtown El Paso. For more than seventy-five years it has served the city as a hotel, office building, and home to government agencies. It was originally built as a hotel on the plaza, the last of three hotels to occupy that site. In 1899, Mrs. Alzina DeGroff, a pioneer in the hotel business in El Paso, acquired the Vendome Hotel and renamed it the Hotel Orndorff after her first husband. She operated it for more than twenty-five years until 1924 when she borrowed 825,000 dollars and hired the renowned El Paso architectural firm Trost and Trost to design a new hotel. The Hotel Orndorff was demolished and a new Orndorff Hotel was constructed at the same site at a cost of more than 1.4 million dollars. Henry C. Trost, who dominated the architectural scene of the American Southwest for more than three decades, designed the building.
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