Sheraton

And the man behind the brand is...
Thomas Sheraton

Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore took over a failing hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Continental at Depression-bargain prices in 1933.
It seems more money was leaving through the storerooms than walking through the front door. A few padlocks plugged the flow of red ink.

Henderson and Moore bought the Stonehaven Hotel and began dreaming of a chain. Their third hotel was a small residential hostelry in Boston that sported an expensive roof sign with the name in large letters. The cost of changing that electric sign might have been more than the price of the entire property so the name of the fledgling hotel chain became Sheraton.

The original Sheraton hotel was purchased deep in the Depression for $160,000. When it was sold ten years later it carried a price tag of nearly $1,000,000. The Boston Sheraton derived its name from Thomas Sheraton,
the 18th century English furniture designer. But strangely the hotel was never decorated in Sheraton's furniture - it was fitted out in a Hepplewhit motif.