The modern financial world was designed in this hotel.
In 1944 the Mount Washington Hotel hosted the Bretton Woods Conference, which established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. That happened in a resort in the White Mountains of New Hampshire because the conference needed somewhere large, remote and comfortable, and this was it.
Joseph Stickney built it. A native of Concord, New Hampshire, he had made a fortune as a coal broker in Pennsylvania before he was thirty. In 1881 he and his partner John N. Conyngham bought the nearby Mount Pleasant Hotel, a large early hotel since demolished in 1939, from the lumberman John T.G. Leavitt, and afterwards Stickney set about building his own. He wanted a luxurious escape for city dwellers.
Construction ran from 1900 to 1902 at a cost of 1.7 million dollars, roughly 66 million today, to a design by Charles Alling Gifford. Stickney brought in 250 Italian artisans to do the work, particularly the granite and stucco masonry, and the building went up in a Y-shape.
It sits at the northern end of Crawford Notch, six miles east of Twin Mountain along US Route 302, in the town of Carroll, with the Bretton Woods ski area nearby. It is a National Historic Landmark, a recognition given only to properties that have made a significant contribution to architecture and history, and a member of Historic Hotels of America. A 50 million dollar renovation began in 2007, upgrading the hotel and rebuilding the golf course.
Look up at the transom windows on your way in: they are original, and genuine Tiffany glass. Then remember that delegates from 44 countries argued the postwar monetary order out in these rooms.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
