English: Built in 1930-31, the grand Art Deco-Style building was designed by the firm Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, and has many Art Deco details, as well as some Classical Revival interior details. The building was opened to great fanfare as the city’s most upscale and desirable hotel, and included a bar, dining room, lounge, and spacious guest rooms with individual bathrooms. The building had several heavily ornamented interior spaces, most notably the main lobby on the first floor, which is octagonal and has many ionic columns and other classical detailing. The hotel was the place where Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935, when Bill Wilson, a New York Stockbroker on a business trip to the city, was tempted by the prospect of a drink at the hotel’s bar. He instead used a lobby phone to call a local surgeon and fellow recovering alcoholic, Dr. Bob Smith, whom met and founded what became Alcoholics Anonymous, creating the Twelve Step program that has helped countless individuals suffering from alcoholism. The building was used as a hotel up into the 1970s, by which point it, along with the rest of downtown and the city of Akron at large, fell into decline and was shuttered. After a significant 1979 renovation, the building was reopened as the Mayflower Manor Apartments, which continues to house subsidized apartments for low-income senior citizens. The building is a contributing structure to the South Main Street Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008. In the summer of 2018, while working as an intern, I was granted the privilege by City Architecture and the Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority to work on plans of existing conditions to prepare the building for a potential refurbishment, partial restoration, and renovation of the building, which allowed for the building to be rehabilitated.