New Trend Brings Nation's Historic Hotels Back to Life

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Christine Pesola's heart sank as she gazed inside what was left of the Hotel Northland in Marquette, Mich., once the social center of a small but busy downtown by the Lake Superior shore.

In its heyday a half-century ago, the Northland was host to visiting politicians, high-society weddings, fancy New Year's Eve parties, the occasional celebrity such as Amelia Earhart, Duke Ellington or Abbott and Costello.

Now it was an abandoned, decaying shell. Pungent carcasses of skunks and birds littered the bare floors. Walls were filthy, windows broken. "It was an eyesore... a big, ugly thing sitting here on the corner," Pesola recalls. Three years later, the historic …