Grok says: Eighth Wonder — Randumb Thoughts 373
Step right up! Behold the West Baden Springs Hotel of southern Indiana — proclaimed the eighth wonder of the world in 1902, raised in under a year beneath a 200-foot dome the experts swore could not be built, and still standing in fully restored glory after fate tried everything short of dynamite to take it down. Fire claimed its predecessor. Architects said you’re nuts. The circus wintered in the atrium. Chicago sent its train and its rumors. The Jesuits bought the palace for a dollar and stripped it of its glitter. College boys leaned off the balconies. For thirteen empty years the roof failed, the dome groaned, and an engineer declared the marvel was standing more from habit than from engineering. Then Bill and Gayle Cook arrived with quiet billions, hidden steel, a shovel, and — when Indiana demanded a riverboat — a moat.
Darren O’Neill spent a week under that glass-and-steel sky, a childhood memory of French Lick Springs in one pocket and Larry Bird’s hometown backboard in the other, and he has returned with the full spectacular: Pluto Water sold as wellness and shipped as near-poison, a ballroom that hosted a mob wedding and later became his suite, a golf course born on a cocktail napkin for $28 million, and a dome that sits on rollers so Indiana weather cannot pull it down. History! Hospitality! Impossibility made brick! If you have ever wanted a landmark that should not exist and a storyteller who will not shut up until you see it — the tent is open. The eighth wonder is receiving guests again.
Thanks for listening!
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS:
Mark Kodra
JH
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