AUGUST 2006 » book review

Booking Hotels

The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, Issue 25, The American Hotel
Edited by Leslie Sternlieb
The Wolfsonian – Florida International University, Miami Beach, FL; 2005
315 pp.; softcover; 280 illus., 60 color; $25
ISBN 1-930776-17-9

Reviewed by Hadiya Strasberg

The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, founded in 1986, explores the role of art and design in relation to social themes. Titles from the past 19 years have covered a broad range of topics, from metalwork to book jackets to transportation. The latest issue, The American Hotel, is a scholarly study of hotels built in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in various regions across America.

Drawing from the Wolfsonian museum's historic photographs, illustrations, papers and books, ten historic preservationists, urban historians, architects and designers of hotels each contributed an essay. Molly W. Berger, in the introduction, separates the first nine articles into three categories: the architectural perspective; the race, class and gender angle; and the modern design of hotels. Using New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Weddell House in Cleveland, OH, as examples, the tenth article raises the debate between preserving old buildings and creating new ones.

The first essay, by Andrew S. Dolkart, "Millionaires' Elysiums: The Luxury Apartment Hotels of Schultze and Weaver," touches upon one of the most prolific architecture firms of the 1920s and '30s in New York City. Schultze and Weaver, Architects, founded in 1921, designed both transient and apartment hotels for clients such as William Waldorf-Astor, Charles Pierre, Louis Sherry and John Bowman and his Biltmore chain.

Dolkart skips over transient and resort hotels, however, and focuses on skyscraper apartment hotels. He describes the creation and the rise of residential hotels, writing that "a few wealthy New Yorkers had made their homes in hotels" in the 19th century and that "the peak years for apartment hotel construction in New York came in the 1920s." He attributes this development to a shift of the New York gentry from choosing to maintain large townhouses to wanting a simpler living situation in which they did not need to manage a household staff. Some moved to smaller homes on the far East Side, but others chose to live in hotels. Some left for the country, taking pied-à-terres or vacations in the city.

Developers also found apartment hotels advantageous. In the 1920s, these hotels "continued to be unregulated by New York's housing laws and thus could still be far larger than apartment houses," writes Dolkart. Developers also illegally converted hotel rooms into "apartments with kitchens." After the law changed in 1929, Dolkart says that the only apartment hotels that were built were ones that catered to the very wealthy, which includes those built by Schultze and Weaver.

Another focus of this essay is the hotels' services and amenities. Dolkart speaks of the elegant restaurants and the luxurious entertainment rooms in great detail. With the exception of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel (1926), most hotels of this period had entertainment rooms, such as ballrooms. What the Sherry lacked in entertainment spaces, due to the relatively small site, the hotel made up for in apartment suite design, amenities and services. The Sherry boasted apartment suites with private terraces overlooking Central Park, wood- or gas-burning fireplaces, modern bathrooms and electrical refrigeration.

Schultze and Weaver didn't adhere to any one style of architecture, says Dolkart, writing that the architects were interested in creating a modern hotel with a traditional feel. "Thus, at the Pierre [Hotel], the exterior is vaguely French Renaissance, but the conservative public interiors freely interpret English Georgian design." The Waldorf-Astoria had an Art Deco exterior, a Neoclassical dining room and individually styled suites in both French and English fashions.

In his closing, Dolkart writes that the end of the apartment hotel era, and large hotels in general, was a result of the Great Depression of 1929. "Indeed, all four of Schultze and Weaver's hotels [discussed in this essay] went bankrupt during the first half of the 1930s." He also rues the architectural alterations of the hotels since then, but ends his article on a positive note: "Schultze and Weaver's skyscraper apartment hotels, once the three tallest hotels in the world, still command attention and admiration."

Berger's "The Rich Man's City: Hotels and Mansions of Gilded Age New York" takes a different angle from Dolkart's article by comparing the hotels to private residences of the wealthy, such as those built by the Vanderbilts and the Astors. The connection was luxury. "With large public rooms on the street level and private rooms above, all elaborately decorated and supported by a parallel network of service rooms," writes Berger, "only scale…distinguished the mansions from the hotels."

Berger reasons that as hotels were built taller and taller, a "parallel domestic building boom produced the expanse of Gilded Age mansions up Manhattan's spine." Mansions and hotels were similar in design: "The same architects and architectural firms designed them, using the same materials, construction techniques, and contractors," writes Berger. Unfortunately, the author does not elaborate on who many of these architects and contractors were or what materials or techniques were utilized.

Instead of focusing on the architectural similarities of these buildings, Berger concentrates on the parallel social activities that took place at both mansions and hotels. The grandeur of a few of the hotels and mansions – the Waldorf-Astoria's Palm Room and Peacock Alley, William H. Vanderbilt's Fifth Avenue residence of 58 rooms, none of which was decorated in the same style – are described, but only to illuminate these social events.

One great difference Berger only briefly touches upon was the social standing of the people who lived in the mansions and those who frequented the hotels. Berger writes that "the hotel was a place where social and cultural events could and would be expanded to include different sets of people." On the other hand, with one exception (once a week, Vanderbilt allowed the public into his home to view his two art galleries), the residential owners most certainly did not invite such a variety of people to their homes.

In another essay, "Early Twentieth Century Hotel Architects and the Origins of Standardization," Lisa Pfueller Davidson focuses on the turn hotel design took from Victorian and Beaux Arts to Modernist architectural styles. The author cites E.M. Statler as paving the way toward "mainstream acceptance of a Modernist aesthetic for franchise hotel-chain architecture." It was the melding of architecture, technology and business, the choice of efficiency over "'gilt-palaces.'"

Other articles of particular interest in the journal include "The New South in the Ancient City" by Reiko Hillyer and "Revisiting Hotels and Other Lodgings" by Myra B. Young Armstead. The former article is about the re-invented identity of St. Augustine, FL, as developer Henry Flagler, in order to cater to norther city's tourists, emphasized the Spanish history instead of its Confederate past. Armstead writes about vacation options for economically privileged black Americans between 1880 and 1950.

It is fitting that The American Hotel concludes with "Wrecking the Joint: The Razing of City Hotels in the First Half of the Twentieth Century," an article by Bernard L. Jim that brings the story of the hotel to a tidy, if disheartening, end. Jim's essay surrounds the public's outrage at the demolitions of New York City's first Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1929, only 32 years after its completion, and Cleveland's Weddell House, which survived for 56 years until it too was destroyed in 1903.

Though Jim doesn't pinpoint the creation of "cultural currents [that] influenced the way people understood the meaning of 'wrecking the joint,'" he says that the on-going argument between modernity and the preservation of traditional structures began in the early-20th century, shaping the way people reacted to the hotel demolitions. Even with demolition propaganda circling, films that portrayed public buildings being torn down had a considerable effect, and the public was overwhelmingly distraught when the Waldorf was destroyed. The importance of the Weddell House, on the other hand, was recognized years after its demolition.

However, working against the public outcry was the Waldorf-Astoria's declining business and "inability to keep pace with … changing standards of luxury." While the public finds significance in a building in large part through "singularization," a process defined by anthropologist Igor Kopytoff in which a public building is viewed as unique and irreplaceable, Jim says that it is not so in the eyes of the developer whose only interest is the bottom line. He again draws from Kopytoff here, who argues that "commodization" works against a building's singularity.

But interestingly, the company that bought the Waldorf-Astoria, Empire State Inc., felt it necessary to "transfer the fetishlike power of the hotel to the Empire State Building," the new building planned for the site. The new developers led an advertising campaign to warm people to the new building and held an auction of the Waldorf's furnishings and fixtures.

No such thing happened in the case of the demolition of Cleveland's Weddell House. While there was public support for preserving the hotel, partly due to the local contributions – of mostly furnishings – made in its construction, there was one Cleveland resident who was unimpressed and actually religiously opposed to the activities within the hotel – a shrewd businessman and Baptist named John D. Rockefeller. In 1903, he ordered the Weddell House demolished and began construction on the 16-story Rockefeller Building.

What is interesting is that the two hotels were replaced by what are now considered icons, just as the previous buildings were thought to be. Jim touches on this, writing, "Today the Empire State Building has become a more potent icon than the Waldorf-Astoria had ever been, and the Rockefeller Building […] has been standing forty years longer than the Weddell House." In his conclusion, Jim argues that the demolitions were unnecessary and that the hotels and other "buildings such as these no longer need to be sacrificed for the sake of future icons."

While the journal's ten essays cover a range of topics, the majority of the hotels discussed are concentrated on the East Coast – mainly in New York City. Also, some of the material overlaps: the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is discussed in no less than four of the ten articles. Unfortunately, there is no index for quick reference on a hotel or architect.

These gripes are minor, however, and don't detract from the content of any of the essays. The authors are more than qualified and bring a significant expertise to their topics. Numerous renderings, paintings and photographs accompany each article. If you are interested in the architecture, the history or the social forces behind late-19th- and early-20th-century hotels, you won't be disappointed. TB

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