This four-story steel-framed brick building brought modern construction to Main Street in Norfolk and opened as the Wangum House in 1913, named after Wangum Lake on Canaan Mountain. Rooms were offered at 75 cents and $1, and a full-service restaurant was located on the main floor. Although there is a horse-drawn carriage parked in front, visitors arriving by automobile could park their vehicles in the garage and fill their tanks with filtered gasoline for 15 cents/gallon at the pump in front. When Albert Martini bought the hotel in 1926 and the adjacent City Meadow, his grandiose expansion plans called for the installation of a sunken garden in the rear, two tennis courts, and a nine-hole course for clock golf, a popular game in which the players would putt from positions arranged like the dial of a clock around the holes. Martini’s plans never materialized, and the Martini Hotel, as it was then called, closed after a few years. The building was eventually converted into small apartments with commercial space on the ground floor. It was demolished in 1994.

— Text by Ann Havemeyer
— Photo courtesy of the Norfolk Historical Society