NFSA

Few people know that Lake Minnetonka used to be lined with hotels. There were inns on this lake as early as the 1850s. Then, one July night in 1945, one of the most beloved of them all, the Hotel Del Otero in Spring Park, caught fire and burned to the ground. As the story goes, people ran out with nothing but their nightclothes. A bellboy climbed out his tower window and dropped onto a porch roof. The owner carried his invalid brother out to safety. A lot of the guests just got in their cars and drove home to Minneapolis. The rest still needed somewhere to spend the night. They found it down by the water, in the old Casino. That building had a story of its own. Back in 1902, the hotel's dance hall burned. By the next summer a new one stood at the edge of the lake. They called it the Spring Park Casino. Back then a casino meant dancing, not gambling, and for years that's what people came for. Then the war came, and a lumber company leased it to build ammunition boxes for the government. So on the night the hotel burned, its guests ended up in a factory. Neighbors from Spring Park came out with coffee and sandwiches. The Del Otero never opened again. I used to hate that every new building has to have a sprinkler system. But once you start learning the history around here, you see how many of these buildings burned down. Maybe a few extra sprinklers to keep the fires from getting too big is a good thing.