ATLANTA-
From the street, the old Winecoff Hotel looks like any number of weathered downtown properties vying to reinvent itself in the midst of the city's tourism boom.
The once-luxurious hotel, built in 1913, was the site of the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history. The 1946 fire killed 119 people and helped forever change fire codes across the country.
Among those killed were 30 high school students participating in a state YMCA mock legislature.
Developers now are renovating the 15-story structure into a 127-room boutique hotel that will be renamed The Ellis, after one of the streets the hotel stands on. It's expected to open in June of next year and will preserve much of the Winecoff's former glory and look–but not its name.
The Winecoff fire–combined with two other deadly fires earlier in 1946, in Illinois and Iowa–led to an overhaul of fire safety protocols in hotels, said Casey Grant, assistant chief engineer for the National Fire Protection Association.
Those new codes included required sprinklers and multiple exits and bans on flammable materials in buildings.
"The Winecoff was part of the string of fires that really helped be a catalyst for the public conscience to help these changes occur," Grant said.
After the fire, the hotel reopened in 1949 as The Peachtree. In 1967, as brand-new luxury hotels gained prominence in downtown Atlanta, The Peachtree closed and its owners sold the building to the Georgia Baptist Association. That group used the building for 15 more years as a senior citizens' home, until it was closed in 1982.
