Downtown
Omni William Penn
Grant Street hotel, opened 1916
The William Penn was the last large building Henry Clay Frick put up. Janssen & Abbott designed it. It cost about six million dollars, and it opened in March 1916 with Secretary of State Philander Knox at the ceremony. Frick sold the hotel in 1928. It has changed hands since, and it is the Omni William Penn now. KDKA, the Pittsburgh radio station, made some of its earliest broadcasts from the building. The twenty-second and twenty-third floors were never guest rooms.
Three deaths are the ones the ghost stories use. In March 1922 a traveling salesman was found dead of a gunshot in a room. Later retellings give him the name Michael York, and they put telegrams about whiskey in the room with him. In 1947 Ruth Harkness died in Pittsburgh. She had brought the first live giant panda out of China, and she had written The Lady and the Panda. Stories told in the hotel put a panda in a hallway and attach the figure to her. In July 1976 Nelson Cooper, a dishwasher, shot and killed Samuel Bankhead, another dishwasher, in a locker room. Since then, guests have reported two men arguing in a corridor when the corridor is empty.
Tour versions also walk Frick through the halls, though he died in 1919, and a woman in a white dress. The three deaths are the ones in the papers.
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