Hotel Oloffson
In 1935, when the occupation ended, the mansion was leased to Werner Gustav Oloffson, a Swedish sea captain from Germany, who converted the property into a hotel with his wife Margot and two sons Olaf and Egon. In the 1950s, Roger Coster, a French photographer, assumed the lease on the hotel and ran it with his Haitian wife, Laura. The hotel came to be known as the "Greenwich Village of the Tropics", attracting actors, writers, and artists. Some of the suites in the hotel were named after the artists and writers who frequented the hotel, including Graham Greene, James Jones, Charles Addams, and Sir John Gielgud.[5]
An American Al Seitz acquired the hotel lease in 1960.[5] During the 1970s and early 1980s, the hotel enjoyed a brief period of fame and good fortune. Celebrities such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Mick Jagger were regular guests, and like Coster before him, Seitz named favorite rooms at the hotel after the celebrity guests.[1] After Al Seitz died in 1982, his widow, the former Suzanne Laury, continued to operate it. As the grip of Duvalierism closed over the country, however, the foreign tourist trade dried up. The hotel survived by serving as the desired residence for foreign reporters and foreign aid workers who needed secure lodging in the center of town.[4]
In 1987, with the help of his half-brother Jean Max Sam, Richard A. Morse signed a 15-year lease to manage the Hotel Oloffson, then in near-ruins after the final years of Duvalierism.[4] In restoring the business, Morse hired a local folkloric dance troupe and slowly converted it into a mizik rasin band. Richard Morse would become the songwriter and lead male vocalist and the name of the band, RAM, comes from his initials.[1] The band became famous for their protest music during the Raoul Cédras military dictatorship from 1991 to 1994. Throughout the political upheaval of Haiti in the 1990s, RAM's regular Thursday evening performance at the hotel became one of the few regular social events in Port-au-Prince in which individuals of various political positions and allegiances could congregate. Regular attendees of the performances included foreign guests at the hotel, members of the military, paramilitary attachés and former Tonton Macoutes, members of the press, diplomats, foreign aid workers, artists, and businessmen.
The hotel was the frequent haunt of Aubelin Jolicoeur (1924-2005). Described as the hotel "palace gadfly", he was a "diminutive, squeaky-voiced, cane-twirling gossip columnist dandy".[1] He wore white linen suits and carried a gold tipped cane. According to Port-au-Prince historian Georges Corvington, "the hotel can't be separated from the personality of Aubelin Jolicoeur. He animated the place. He cultivated a lot of acquaintances and was the center of the hotel. Foreign artists and celebrities came to see him."[6] His heyday was the 1950s through 70s when he wrote articles about the comings and goings of celebrity guests, later becoming something of a local institution who met guests at the airport.[1][7]
During the 12 January 2010, earthquake, the Hotel Oloffson was damaged. US photographer Tequila Minsky who was also staying in the Oloffson, told the New York Times that a wall at the front of the Hotel Oloffson had fallen, killing a passer-by, and that several neighboring buildings had collapsed.[8] Richard Morse, using the social networking site Twitter, was a major source of news coming out of the disaster area in the early hours. In a Twitter post from 12 January, he states "Our guests are sitting out in the driveway.. no serious damage here at the Oloffson but many large buildings nearby have collapsed."[9] The hotel was one of Port-au-Prince's only hotels left standing and the worldwide media subsequently decamped to the hotel and its grounds.
