One of the halls of the Ural region exhibits a picture postcard with a view of the American Hotel in Yekaterinburg. Fyodor Reshetnikov never stayed in this hotel, as he died in 1871, two years prior to its opening. Nevertheless, the hotel reminds us of Reshetnikov’s nomadic life. Over a period of 22 years, the writer lived in Yekaterinburg, Solikamsk, and Perm. In 1863, he moved to Petersburg where he switched several residences. The writer’s diary says a five-room apartment was replaced by a ‘humble abode at two rubles per month’. The departure of his wife to Brest-Litovsk marked the beginning of Reshetnikov’s life on the move, torn apart between the two cities.

The first owner of the hotel was Pavel Kholkin, the second guild merchant. Initially eighteen-room inn grew into a thirty-sex room hotel. Its owner resorted to “I”ll scratch your back, and you”ll scratch mine” tactics. He used to pay carriage drivers for bringing in new guests and spread the word about the hotel in the press. In 1910, a hotel advertisement read “Cuisine par excellence and a chef invited from Moscow. A restaurant. Billiard rooms. Regardful attendants. Confectionery and coffee shop”. A year later, the advertisement was expanded to “bathrooms”, “Russian and foreign….magazines”. The American Hotel was considered the best one in Yekaterinburg before the Revolution. Accommodation was expensive. The stay at the American Hotel cost four rubles a day, while other hotels offered their rooms for one or two rubles.

In 1890, writer Anton Chekhov booked a room at the American Hotel. Though skeptical of Yekaterinburg overall, he liked the hotel. In 1899, DmItriy Mendeleev stayed there, too. He noted: “It is true that the city is big, but it is somewhat depressing…”. In 1915, KonstantIn Balmont, a Russian poet who was touring the country, also became a patron of the hotel, which was already renamed The American Rooms. When interview by a journalist from The Life in the Urals newspaper, he said that Ekaterinburg was “a slumbering city that dropped behind the capital” and regarded its people as uncultured since they were not familiar with his poems. His advertising posters were eaten for goats. On this occasion the poet made a joke “My fame went so far that I have admirers among the Yekaterinburg goats”.

In 1918, the building of the former hotel housed the Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution. Since 1967, the building has been housing the Sverdlovsk Art School Named After Shadre.