Kettenbach Building

Kettenbach Building. . H.C. Kettenbach, Lewiston businessman, built this block in about 1907, probably to replace an earlier Kettenbach building which had housed a pioneer Lewiston newspaper, the Lewiston Teller. Lewiston City Officies occupied the building in its earlier years. There was a large store and room for four smaller business on the ground floor. On the upper floor was the Kettenbach European Hotel. Later, under new management it became the Princess Hotel, one of several bordellos which in the Twenties and Thirties lined Main Street west of 5th. , The building features imported cast iron fronts and oriel, or bay, windows. It is said that during the Twenties the "ladies of the night" draped in the bay windows and smiling at those below attracted potential customers. The city closed the houses of prostitution early in World War II at the insistence of the Navy which had a training unit at the Northern Idaho College of Education, later Lewis-Clark State College.