The Divine Lorraine Hotel, a longtime symbol of grandeur gone to seed on Philadelphia's North Broad Street, inspires an unprecedented level of devotion in the city's preservation-minded residents. Now, after an extensive renovation, it's ready for the newest chapter in its storied history.

Designed by architect Willis G. Hale and built between 1892 and 1894 as the Lorraine Apartments, a luxury residential building, the Divine Lorraine Hotel became a place for shorter-term stays in 1900 (at which point it was simply called the Lorraine Hotel). The Rev. Major J. Divine purchased the late Victorian high-rise in 1948 and renamed it, operating his Divine Peace Mission Movement out of the structure and providing affordable housing and meals, as well as a place of worship, for his followers.

As Maria Gorshin writes in an Untapped Cities post, "Later, as North Philadelphia shifted from prosperous to poverty-stricken, Reverend Divine’s building served as a beacon of hope in the area and his sermons began to promote equality, desegregation and anti-lynching legislation." Today, the Divine Lorraine is recognized as Philadelphia's first integrated hotel.

The Divine, located on Philadelphia’s North Broad Street, closed in 1999. The community saw repeated attempts at reusing the building fall flat, and so it was with hope guarded by well-deserved skepticism that Philadelphia listened to developer Eric Blumenfled talk about how he was going to revitalize the hotel.

"The building was teetering on demolition for about a decade," he told Philadelphia’s WBUR in July 2016. "And to me it was kind of representative of what this city is going to do—we were at a crossroad, and if we could not salvage such a beautiful piece of history and architecture, it made a poor statement on the future of Philadelphia."