Riding the Graduate’s Historic Glass Elevator

Photograph by Wolf Matthewson

Throughout its 102-year history, residents have flocked to the Biltmore Hotel — now the Graduate Providence hotel — for its grand ballroom and flashy restaurants. In 1979, the downtown icon debuted a new attraction, a glass elevator that laid claim to the city’s best view from its eighteenth floor. Four years earlier, the hotel had shut its doors due to mismanagement. A group of local business leaders encouraged by newly elected Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci rallied to save it, and the Biltmore reopened, shiny new elevator and all. “He had this vision of Providence that it was going to be the center of New England, or the world,” says Amanda Quay Blount, author of Meet Me at the Biltmore: 100 Years at Providence’s Most Storied Hotel. Much like its biggest supporter, the elevator’s glitzy exterior belied a less trustworthy core, and it faced repeated problems before it was shut down for good in the 1990s. Today, the elevator remains as a portal to another time, when the city’s renaissance was just a dream thrown around in a hotel bar. “I think of that elevator as [Cianci’s] observation tower in a way,” Blount says. “He wanted people to come see Providence, and that was the way he was going to do it.”