For its 58th season, Georgetown’s Hotel de Paris Museum is opening two rooms that previously were closed to the public to make the building’s history come alive for visitors.
The hotel opened May 17 to give officials from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Historic Georgetown Inc., History Colorado and other organizations a peek at the two previously off-limits areas.
Museum director Kevin Kuharic, who was hired in 2010, has worked to make the museum a more interactive experience.
“My legacy here, to this point, has been public access,” Kuharic said. “Because we’re not building new wings like museums do, we’re working with pre-existing conditions and infrastructure, and so the only way to create more access was the removal of ropes.”
Taking away physical barriers, he said, gives the public better access to the past.
“(People have) got to feel a connection with their heart and their soul, and so getting up close to objects, interacting with objects … seeing themselves in Louis Dupuy’s story — I think those are the keys to our success,” Kuharic said.
The hotel was opened in 1875 by Dupuy, a linguist, military deserter, Rocky Mountain News reporter and miner. After being injured in a mining accident, Dupuy used funds donated to him to rent a local bakery, which he later bought and turned into a restaurant and hotel.
This year, Kuharic said the museum is shifting its educational mission away from a purely chronological timeline.
“Really, (Dupuy’s) story is going to be boiled down to the story of reinvention of oneself — and I think it is something that every visitor would be able to relate to,” Kuharic said. “A checkered past, a troubled man who came to crossroads in his life, and he finally gets it right and ends up, by the time he dies, being a civic leader and a successful entrepreneur and a chef known worldwide.”
An integral part of Georgetown tourism
Georgetown Mayor Craig Abrahamson was among those who toured the rooms. In recent years, he said, the hotel has become a primary destination in Georgetown thanks to the efforts of Kuharic and the site’s owners, the National Society of Colonial Dames of America.
Abrahamson said the museum is an important part of the town’s historic district and a major attraction, similar to the Georgetown Loop Railroad and the Hamill House Museum.
“Preservation and recreation tourism is our economy in Georgetown, and it is the private entities that do all of the hard work and the heavy lifting to maintain and enhance that,” Abrahamson said. “It is the town’s responsibility to support that in any way we can.”
The National Society of Colonial Dames of America bought the hotel in 1954, and it is now a historic site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Contact Ian Neligh at couranteditor@evergreenco
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