The Read House Hotel

Jazz Age glamour, and the guest in Room 311

★★★★★📍 Downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee$$$

The history: the Read family's hotel became Chattanooga's grand address in the railroad era, hosting presidents and celebrities, and the 1920s rebuild set the Jazz Age tone that the 2018 restoration revived. Room 311's legend grew over the twentieth century until the hotel stopped hiding from it, and the room's reputation is now part of the hotel's identity. Some history worth knowing: a hotel has stood on the site since 1872, succeeding the Crutchfield House, which served as a military hospital in 1863; the current 10-story building, designed by Holabird and Roche of Chicago in a Georgian manor style, opened on July 5, 1926, and so turned 100 this year; and the hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Winston Churchill stayed on a 1932 lecture tour, and the guest list also includes Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Room craft: Room 311 is not on the regular booking engine. The hotel sells it as a limited October package, the Room 311 Experience, booked by phone and bundled with valet parking, cocktails in the Bar and Billiards Room, a dining credit at Bridgeman's Chophouse and tickets for a Chattanooga ghost tour, and it is offered on only a handful of nights. In-person tours of the room are arranged on request when a guide is free, and a virtual tour is online. For dinner, Bridgeman's Chophouse, named for a longtime waiter, is the hotel's aged-steak room. Other rooms give you the Jazz Age style without the lore. Have a drink in the billiards bar, and walk down to the river in the evening for the lit-up bridges.

Practicals: 107 West MLK Boulevard, downtown Chattanooga; 24-hour valet parking; about two hours from Nashville, Atlanta and Knoxville. Fit: a haunted weekend in Chattanooga, and a natural stop between the haunted South and the Midwest prisons.