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

For almost two hundred years the extravagant architectural settings of American luxury hotels have imitated European palaces, yet the technological advances have been distinctly modern and just as conspicuous. A cascade of innovations set new standards in comfort for residents and efficiency for management. Plumbing, heating, ventilation, lighting, elevators, and food-preparation and communications systems often surpassed the amenities of the most extravagant private houses. Europeans and Americans have also marveled at the scale and complexity of these buildings, first their Brobdingnagian bulk with the ever-increasing number of rooms, and then their heights, as they adopted the steel-frame construction of the first office-building skyscrapers.

Early-nineteenth-century newspapers dubbed these hotels “palaces of the people.” While sumptuous, even imposing, the abundant public spaces were open to a broad-based clientele, nurturing a public life in which local residents, especially but not exclusively the elite, mingled with itinerant guests in splendid bars, restaurants, and lobbies as well as bustling barber shops, ticket offices, and other public services. Not so long ago I often met friends for a drink or breakfast at some of the hotels in this book, even though neither of us was staying there.

Molly W. Berger’s Hotel Dreams chronicles the first century of these luxury hotels. The journey takes us from Boston’s Tremont House, a radical break from simple taverns where sojourners shared rooms, through E. M. Statler’s hotels of the late 1920s, the first to provide luxury accommodations for middle-class travelers. The book concentrates on major cities. General chapters alternate with case studies on Tremont House, Philadelphia’s Continental Hotel, San Francisco’s Palace, and Chicago’s Stevens Hotel. Not surprisingly, New York City features prominently in every chapter. Each example was touted as the largest, grandest, most advanced, and most desirable example of the type. Extensive information about square footage, accouterments, technological innovations, and extravagant events backs up such claims. The grandiloquent marketing aligned with urban boosterism: an opulent hotel with the most up-to-date services suggested the cosmopolitan flair and economic energy of that particular city.

The research is thorough, almost relentlessly so. Biographies of successful owners and managers are sometimes overburdened with extraneous details. In contrast, the spatial descriptions are fascinating. Alongside vivid evocations of “garrulous” social life, Hotel Dreams rightly focuses on the modernity of what Berger calls “technological luxury.” She takes us through the extensive systems of workrooms, equipment, and mechanical connections to service the ever-larger buildings with their ever-higher standards. For example, New York’s 1902 Belmont Hotel had five underground stories to accommodate its power plants, laundry, and cooking facilities. As one popular magazine noted in 1897, “it is part of the hotel business to hide all these things from view” (p. 188).

Despite her keen enthusiasm, Berger emphasizes a fundamental disparity. While social classes mixed more freely than in European hotels, the American elite became ever more ostentatious in displaying their wealth at glorious events in the finest luxury hotels. Despite paeans to democratic mixing, inequalities were omnipresent and grew more extreme over time. Some grandiose hotels of the early twentieth century had more than 1,000 rooms with at least one (sometimes two or more) employees per guest. Every technical worker or domestic servant had to be demure and discreet, almost but not quite invisible—just like the technology.

This is a welcome addition to books on resort hotels and the “flabbergast” post–World War II Miami hotels of Morris Lapidus—topics Berger herself analyzed in previous publications. Unfortunately the abundant material is sometimes disorganized and repetitious. Taking her sources somewhat too literally, Berger lauds the “unprecedented” scale, expense, opulence, and amenities of many examples. Too often they “anticipate” new trends and “culminate” earlier ones, not just luxury-hotel prototypes but much larger topics, including the “culture of consumer capitalism” (p. 216).

Berger argues convincingly that the luxury hotel was an American invention. She...