winning a legal battle over the rights to the Smuggler Mine, the richest lode in the area, and leaving Macy's, he commissioned the building of the hotel and the Wheeler Opera House, both bearing his name, and a house in the city's residential West End. Wheeler meant for the hotel to be the equal of great European hotels such as Claridge's in London and the George-V in Paris. He loaned $60,000 ($ in modern dollars) to another local innkeeper to build the hotel. Costs escalated to more than twice that, and a month before the hotel was set to open the builders left town unexpectedly, leaving Wheeler owing approximately $150,000 ($ in modern dollars). "[He had] discovered the first rule of building in Aspen: it always costs way more than you planned", observed a commentator over a century later. It was one of the first buildings west of the Mississippi to have full electric lighting. Other amenities included running water and indoor plumbing, steam heat and an elevator. At the time of its opening, on the night before Thanksgiving, it had 90 rooms (or 76, according to some accounts), which rented for up to $4 ($ in modern dollars) a night. Early guests included Wheeler's business friends from the East, theater stars of the era and wealthy travelers. As its builder had intended, it occupied the most commanding location in the city. Three years after its completion, in 1892, Wheeler sold the hotel to a Denver man named Archie Fisk for $125,000 ($ in modern dollars) as part of a general liquidation of his Aspen assets after losing a lengthy lawsuit over a mining deal. The next year, in response to the Panic of 1893, Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, ending the Colorado Silver Boom and with it Aspen's early boom years. Fisk could not pay taxes on the property, and it soon became the property of Pitkin County, and then became Wheeler's again. It remained the center of the city's social life, partially because it had the only public bathroom downtown. 1893–1946: The quiet years Over the next several decades, a period that came to be known later as "the quiet years", the town's population declined from thousands to hundreds. The Jerome remained open, the city's only hotel, often becoming by default a boardinghouse. In 1911 ownership passed to local businessman Mansor Elisha, a Syrian American drummer