An Unfortunate Series of Events
I booked a suite at the Hard Rock Chicago for Lollapalooza weekend. While I live in the city, I was attending the event with clients and wanted a Loop home base. The hotel is very well situated for that purpose, and the suites (in the narrow tower atop the building) are spacious with spectacular views - this particular suite looks onto Michigan Ave. to the north and down the river to the west. The bathroom was tired with cracked tile and lightly mildewed grout: not horrible but not what you want to see in an expensive tower suite. The absolute best thing about HR Chicago is undoubtedly the structure itself - the Carbon and Carbide building is a green terra cotta and gilt Art Deco masterpiece.
Anyway, things went downhill fast after check in. The Hard Rock is closely connected to the festival. Many VIPs (including band members) seem to stay there, which is cool in the abstract. But HR is in fact an atrocious place to be during Lolla due mostly to hotel mismanagement. All of the public areas, bars, restaurants, meeting spaces, and other amenities are 100% handed over to private events shilling for Hyundais, booze, cellular services etc. This leads to throngs of meatheads mobbing every inch of the place in search of free hooch and it means that hotel guests have no access to any amenities whatsoever. One manager/bouncer advised that I was as free as anyone else to stand in line for a wristband to get into the restaurant/Hyundai hip-hop club wannabe. A guest later actually tried that, but was turned away for not being on "the list." 
Hotel mismanagement really stood out on Saturday night when some drunk kid tossed a huge block of concrete from a construction project down the tower stairwell, smashing water pipes from the sprinkler system, flooding the stairwell and tower elevators, and creating a very dangerous situation. Setting aside the question why they had construction materials in a fire escape stairwell in the first place, the hotel handled this horribly. The incident happened a few hour before we returned to the hotel. When we arrived back there early Sunday morning, tired, muddy and tipsy, no one from the hotel was around to provide information, and no signs had been posted anywhere. When the elevator doors opened to reveal water gushing from the ceiling, I called the desk. Management's "solution" was to tell guests to hoof it up 15 flights of wet concrete stairs and to be careful. 6 hours later, the elevators still were not working, so getting to the street, with luggage, involved the same 15 flight hike with no help offered or given by the hotel. When confronted with the hotel's complete lack of service and its questionable decision to send guests into a dangerous situation, the manager on duty (a well-beaten man by this point) responded to my criticism by asking "what was I supposed to do?" He also said something about one of the other guests ruining things for everyone. The hotel offered nothing when I checked out. Not even the satisfaction of its desk staff asking: "How was your stay?"