In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

chapter seven tHe “new” moDern Hotel, 1880–1920 “It Is Part of the Hotel Business to Hide All These Things from View” While the story of the Palace Hotel might seem idiosyncratic, driven as it was by an overriding commitment to excess by its fanatical promoter, economic and political leaders in American cities large and small shared an understanding about the way grand hotels, their architecture and interiors, served as material testimony to a city’s economic and cultural ranking in the world. After Chicago’s disastrous fire in 1871, that city rebounded in part by building four of the nation’s most important hotel buildings,the Grand Pacific Hotel,and the Tremont, Palmer, and Sherman Houses. In addition to the understandable claims for their superior fireproofing, these buildings boasted the quintessential urbane signifiers: grand lobbies, monumental staircases, elegant parlors, cafes, barber shops, bridal suites, dining rooms, ballrooms, promenades, hundreds of private bedrooms and baths, and all the latest luxuries. These four Chicago landmarks not only spoke to the city’s remarkable recuperative power but also served as benchmarks for successor hotels, including the Palace. An 1873 headline in Chicago’s real estate newspaper Land Owner proclaimed “Chicago Ahead of the World,” a headline that was tied to a description of the Sherman House.1 Large luxury hotels like these continued to play a critical role for cities in their ability to attract visitors, business, and ongoing development. San Francisco’s Palace Hotel capped the age of enormous masonry-constructed hotels. Although the particular circumstances of San Francisco’s economy allowed the construction of the Palace, the nationwide economic depression dampened building construction elsewhere in the country, with building starts reaching a low in 1878 not equaled again until World War I.2 In the 1880s, the hotel industry  Hotel Dreams seemed to mark time. Some monumental pre–Civil War hotels such as the St. Nicholas and the New York began to close, making way for new development.3 In his published memoir of his return 1879–80 tour of the United States, George Augustus Sala dwelled once again on American hotels, and his descriptions hardly varied from his earlier observations, except to note with relief the demise of the hotel gong that called guests to meals.4 The industry, taking on a more cohesive organization, began to publish not only national trade journals and city-specific hotel registers directed at hotelmen and traveling salesmen but also comprehensive national hotel directories to aid travelers and merchants.5 In addition, several hotelmen published exposés of hotel life. The 1884 Horrors of Hotel Life by a Reformed Landlord was a particularly vivid and gruesome book that seemed capable of singlehandedly destroying the industry.6 These activities were prelude, however, to a new building boom that seized on modern advances in construction technologies and promised a new era in hotel accommodations. By the time the economy recovered, revolutionary construction methods relegated “monster hotels” to a seemingly premodern past. The Equitable Life Assurance Building’s 130-foot height (New York, 1868–70) quickly inspired building technologies that enabled skyward growth such as was seen in New York’s 260-foot Tribune Building (1875). By the late 1880s, twelve- to sixteen-story buildings had been built in considerable numbers in both Chicago and New York. These technologies included the development of fast, safe, and dependable elevators; fireproofed structural iron; steel-frame construction; electric lighting; the telephone; elaborate plumbing systems; temperature controls; and healthful ventilation.7 Nearly all skyscraper histories focus exclusively on the corporate office building, but urban luxury hotels participated wholeheartedly in this structural revolution, as they had with other architectural shifts. One architectural critic noted that the turn of the century’s opulent hotels came to represent the full expression of New York as “the rich man’s city.”8 Seeking to capture the spirit of the decade of growth that began in the early 1890s, The World’s Work published a 1903 article called“The Workings of a Modern Hotel.” The author, novelist and writer Albert Bigelow-Paine, introduced the article with words meant to impress:“Among all our institutions of progress, there is none more amazing than the modern hotel in immensity, in complex activities, in social significance.” Thus began a lengthy description of a modern hotel’s ingenuity , buttressed by stunning statistics of every kind that reinforced the sheer magnitude of the building and the services offered within. Subtitles such as “A Story of Organized Luxury” and “A Vast...

Share