Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829–1929

8. The Stevens Hotel, Chicago, 1927: “Virtually a Multiple of Twenty-Five Small Hotels”

chapter eight tHe stevens Hotel, CHiCago, 1927 “Virtually a Multiple of Twenty-Five Small Hotels” When the Stevens Hotel opened on May 2, 1927, nine thousand people came for dinner. During the more than two years that encompassed its planning and building,Ernest J.Stevens,the hotel’s projector,majority shareholder, and manager, had thoroughly promoted his new hotel as the world’s largest and greatest. The perfectly orchestrated opening festivities not only introduced the hotel to Stevens’ guests but also demonstrated its enormously scaled capabilities and the fulfillment of promised expectations. In a number of ways, the Stevens serves as the perfect capstone to this century-long hotel history. Not only did the Stevens retain the “world’s largest hotel” title for several decades, it represented many of the tensions that had built up over the century, including the drive for individual expression within a standardized form, the celebration of local enterprise within a global marketplace, the enormous challenge and cost of technological development , and a last great effort to corner symbolic capital against the new commercial urban icon, the corporate skyscraper. Although the last chapter focused primarily on New York City hotels and Statler’s strategy to standardize hotel luxury, Chicago, the nation’s second-largest city, also emerged as a national center for competitive hotel development, particularly by the 1920s. Three of the major industry trade journals published from Chicago. Hence, every new plan for a large Chicago hotel received its share of attention. During the nineteenth century, Chicago had developed as a gateway to the West for eastern commercial districts. By the twentieth century, the city had become an industrial and financial center in its own right, represented by corporate giants such as Armour,Wrigley, Pullman, Swift, and Field. This growth created a need for important hotels; yet, during the century’s first two decades, Chicago  Hotel Dreams found itself consistently short on luxury facilities. As in New York, some of the city’s early entrepreneurial elite—such as Francis C. Sherman, Potter Palmer, and John B. Drake—built and managed luxury hotels. In the 1890s, the Stevens family fashioned a financial empire, first in dry goods and real estate, then in life insurance , branching into the hotel business in the new century’s first decade by building the very successful Hotel LaSalle. The Stevens Hotel continued the tradition, first begun in Boston one hundred years earlier, whereby upper-class businessmen sought to replicate,commercialize,and purvey an elite lifestyle in the name of civic enterprise and inter-urban competition.1 The Stevens Hotel story brings together several of our familiar threads. It represents the culmination of technological developments first set in motion by the Tremont House. The Stevens competed in the same sort of rivalry with New York City as had Philadelphia’s Continental, and shouldered with San Francisco’s hotels the burden of demonstrating cosmopolitan maturation and sophistication. Ernest Stevens, William Ralston, and E. M. Statler all revealed a common inner drive that compelled each to build the “largest hotel in the world.” This drive, coupled with an incautious optimism encouraged by a thriving but temporary boom economy, brought financial ruin to both Stevens and Ralston, and death to Ralston and The Stevens, Chicago. Opened in 1927, the hotel’s 2,818 bedrooms earned the title as the world’s largest hotel. Postcard in collection of author. The Stevens Hotel, Chicago, 1927  Stevens’s business partner and brother. Just as the depression of the 1870s destroyed Ralston’s empire, the Great Depression of the 1930s did the same to the Stevens family. In trying to salvage the hotel, the Stevenses used money from their life insurance company, which resulted in charges being brought against them for embezzlement by the State of Illinois. The promoters of each of the case studies championed their projects as being necessary to their city’s commercial success and as representing their city’s achievements and potential. Each drew on local artisans and industry to construct a local product that conformed to and embellished a national—by this time, international —hotel ideal. At the same time, as others had done before him, Stevens sought to individualize his hotel even as he drew on Statler’s standardization and management methods. Chicago’s Stevens Hotel was a product of and helped shape a reorganized society dominated by corporate and consumer capitalism. Its complete immersion into a national network of technology...