Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................1
One BUILDINGS AND SYSTEMS....................11
1. A Public House for a New Republic: Inventing the American Hotel, 1789-1815....................13
2. Palaces of the Public: The American Hotel Comes of Age, 1815-1840....................45
3. The Hotel System: Assembling a Transcontinental Accommodation Network, 1840-1876....................75
4. Imperial Hotels and Hotel Empires: Tourism, Expansion, Standardization, and the Beginning of the End of a Hotel Age, 1876-1908....................110
Two HOSPITALITY....................137
5. The House of Strangers: The Transformation of Hospitality and the Everyday Life of the Hotel....................142
6. The Law of Hospitality: The Common Law of Innkeepers and the Public Space of the Hotel....................186
7. Unruly Guests and Anxious Hosts: Sex, Theft, and Violence at the Hotel....................203
Three A NATION OF HOSTS AND GUESTS....................229
8. American Forum: Hotels and Civil Society....................231
9. Homes for a World of Strangers: House, Hotel, Apartment Building....................263
10. Accommodating Jim Crow: The Law of Hospitality and the Struggle for Civil Rights....................284
Conclusion....................312
Notes....................317
Acknowledgments....................357
Illustration Credits....................360
Index....................363
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HOTEL
An American History
By A. K. Sandoval-Strausz Yale University Press
Copyright © 2007 A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-10616-9
Chapter One
A Public House for a New Republic Inventing the American Hotel, 1789-1815
GEORGE WASHINGTON began his journey on an overcast October morning in 1789. The president and a small retinue of officials and servants mounted their horses at nine o'clock and rode northward out of the national capital at New York City. It was slow going. "The Road for the greater part, indeed the whole way," Washington wrote in his diary, "was very rough and Stoney," and a steady morning rain and "frequent light Showers" that lasted through the afternoon left the riders wet in their saddles. Yet on the whole the transplanted Virginian was pleased with what he saw that day. He noted that the "Land [was] strong, well covered with grass and a luxurient Crop of Indian Corn intermixed with Pompions [pumpkins]," and farmers informed him that "their Crops of Wheat and Rye have been abundant." The party also passed "four droves of Beef Cattle" and "a flock of Sheep" being driven south to the city markets. Washington observed that the local livestock "seemed to be of a good quality," but hedged somewhat on the hogs, which he deemed "large but rather long legged." As daylight began to fade, the president and his entourage stopped for the night at the Square House Inn in the town of Rye, New York, thirty-two miles from where they had set out.
Thus began Washington's presidential tours of 1789-1791, the most important travels in American political history. Shortly after taking office, the president had begun planning an official journey through the thirteen United States so that he could "acquire knowledge of the face of the Country the growth and Agriculture there and of the temper and disposition of the Inhabitants towards the new government." While his interest in geography and agriculture were doubtless sincere, the primary purpose of the tours was political. Washington had assumed the presidency of a nation that had spent almost its entire thirteen-year existence on the brink of collapse. The external threat posed by the British Army was laid to rest by the Treaty of Paris in 1783, only to be replaced by internal factionalism and instability under the feeble Articles of Confederation. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 barely managed to agree on a new governing framework, and the Constitution itself met with considerable opposition and was ratified by unexpectedly narrow margins. It was with good reason that many contemporary observers expected the infant republic to die in its cradle.
Washington envisioned a grand national tour on which he would make personal visits to cities and towns, using his extraordinary popularity to solidify public support for the fragile new federal government. There was no doubt about the president's standing among the citizenry: he had led the Continental Army to victory against the world's greatest military power, and his resultant status as America's first national hero had allowed him to win every single electoral vote in the election of 1788, a feat never to be equaled. Still, Washington had concerns about the proper execution of the tours. He understood that their success-and perhaps the fate of the nation-depended heavily upon his performance as a unifying national icon; and his keen political instincts and preoccupation with personal comportment told him that his every action would be freighted with symbolic significance.
It was for this reason that Washington decided to refuse private hospitality and stay only at public houses. When it had become known that the president would be making a national tour, he had begun to receive letters from local officials, former comrades, family members, and other acquaintances inviting him to stay at their homes when he made his appearance in their communities. Washington was grateful for the generosity of his aspiring hosts, but he believed that accepting such offers risked the appearance of favoritism. The act of showing special consideration by lodging with private individuals, even members of his own family, would set a bad example that might undermine Washington's public image as a man above politics and compromise the proper impartiality of the presidency. He therefore declined such invitations and instead resolved to put up at the same inns and taverns where other travelers sought shelter.
Washington held to his principles, but at the cost of considerable personal discomfort. Over the course of more than two thousand miles of travel that took him from the northernmost state of New Hampshire to Georgia in the far South, he made regular notations in his diary regarding the quality of America's public houses. While the president was sometimes pleased with the inns and taverns at which he stayed, during the last third of his northern tour he became increasingly dissatisfied with them, noting that several were "indifferent" and observing on other occasions that the previous night's tavern was "not a good house," though he was gracious enough to recognize when "the People of it were disposed to do all they cou'd to accommodate me." Travel conditions on Washington's southern tour of 1791 were even less satisfactory. In addition to the usual uneven quality of public houses, there were many instances in which none was available at all. Traveling in North Carolina, the president complained that though he wished to get out of the rain, "the only Inn short of Hallifax having ... no Rooms or beds which appeared tolerable, & everything else having a dirty appearance, I was compelled to keep on." Farther into the journey, Washington grumbled that "the accomadations on the whole Road [to Savannah] we found extremely indifferent-the houses being small and badly provided either for man or horse."
Uncomfortable lodgings notwithstanding, Washington's presidential tours were a tremendous success. They increased the prestige of the presidency, fostered popular faith in the federal government, and helped bind the states into a nation by cultivating a collective sense of identity.
The tours may also have led to the creation of the American hotel.
When President Washington first took office in 1789, the finest public house in the United States was a three-story building about fifty feet long on a side, containing perhaps twenty rooms, and valued at roughly fifteen thousand dollars. Two decades later, in 1809, the nation's leading public accommodation occupied an enormous seven-story edifice which covered nearly an acre of land, comprised more than two hundred rooms, and cost more than half a million dollars. But the invention of the hotel was more than just a milestone in the history of public houses. It also reflected important changes in the way Americans defined their communities, engaged in politics, organized their economic activities, and socialized with one another. The transformation of public houses not only reveals the origins of one of the most familiar building types in the modern world, it also shows how the ideals of the Revolution and the conflicts of the early republic were manifested on the American landscape.
PUBLIC HOUSES IN EARLY AMERICA
Public house was the formal name for an establishment that sold alcoholic drinks and rented lodgings to travelers. Public houses were more commonly called taverns, inns, and sometimes ordinaries, terms that were used interchangeably: Washington, for example, wrote of "the Tavern of a Mrs. Haviland at Rye; who keeps a very neat and decent Inn." What made a public house public was its having been licensed by state or local officials. A tavern license involved a fairly simple quid pro quo: the innkeeper was given the privilege of entering the highly profitable business of retailing alcoholic drinks in exchange for a promise to offer overnight accommodations to the public. Because strong drink posed a potential threat to public order, licenses were granted only to people who could be relied upon to keep an orderly premises where drunkenness, gambling, and other forms of vice would be prohibited. Selling alcohol without a license was a serious crime, and an unlicensed tavern could be closed down and its keeper subject to fines or imprisonment. In this way, colonial governments killed three birds with one stone: they established control over the sale and consumption of alcohol, provided wayfarers with shelter, and established a source of revenue in the form of licensing fees. Virtually every community in British North America was home to one or more public houses, thousands of which served drinkers and travelers in the colonies.
Eighteenth-century Americans expected little of their public houses architecturally. George Washington suggested as much by the decidedly backhanded compliment he paid a Connecticut establishment, which he described as having "a good external appearance (for a Tavern)." The great majority of taverns in British North America were dwelling houses or other structures that had been constructed for a different function but were subsequently adapted to a new use. Because they were not purpose built, early American public houses did not share any distinctive architectural features or have an identifiable form. Their appearance instead followed from the vernacular building styles common to the region in which they were located (figs. 1.1, 1.2). In order to identify public houses that were visually indistinguishable from private homes or shops, most publicans put up hanging tavern signs emblazoned with memorable names and symbols. In some cases, even these visual cues failed to compensate for the tavern's architectural anonymity, leaving travelers unable to find shelter without the assistance of local residents.
The humble character of eighteenth-century public houses was also discernible in their valuations: most taverns were assessed at between several hundred and a few thousand dollars. A few socially eminent inns averaged well under ten thousand dollars, and even purpose-built establishments in the first rank of prestige and elegance never exceeded fifteen thousand. In cost, as in external appearance, taverns rarely stood out.
The internal arrangement of American taverns was correspondingly unprepossessing. A 1973 archaeological study commissioned by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation determined that taverns in eighteenth-century Virginia generally comprised only six to ten rooms, a size that recent studies of public houses in Massachusetts and Philadelphia suggest was close to the norm in the period. All of a tavern's functional spaces-its kitchen, bar, public rooms, bedchambers, and the quarters of the innkeeper's family-thus had to be crowded into a small number of available rooms. As a result, a tavern's interior spaces tended to be unspecialized: drinks might be served from an enclosed cage in a front room where food was also prepared (fig. 1.3), and the space around the hearth could double as a sleeping area. Because even the main room of a tavern could be relatively small, it could easily become overcrowded. Patrons were consequently accustomed to drinking and talking cheek by jowl with other customers.
The close quarters of the tavern also dictated particular sleeping arrangements. The small number of rooms in taverns made it impossible for guests to have their own bedchambers. Eighteenth-century travelogues regularly mentioned shared rooms, and colonial-era inventories recorded the presence of multiple bedsteads in individual chambers. When public houses were crowded, guests were often squeezed into even closer contact with one another: the sharing of beds was not uncommon. While most travelers simply accepted this custom as a necessity, it was resented by respectable wayfarers, who complained constantly about being forced into such close encounters with the unclean bodies and rude manners of tradesmen and laborers. One traveler complained that "after you have been some time in bed, a stranger of any condition (for there is little distinction), comes into the room, pulls off his clothes, and places himself, without ceremony, between your sheets." (This practice persisted for decades in some public houses: in Moby-Dick, Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed at the Spouter-Inn.) Another confided to his diary that because other tavern patrons were drunk and staggering, and "kept up the Roar-Rororum till morning," he had "watched carefully all night, to keep them from falling over and spewing upon me."
These were by no means the only criticisms leveled at American public houses. The nation's inns and taverns elicited torrents of invective from diarists and travel writers. The most common complaints involved tavern beds, which were described as dirty, uncomfortable, and insect ridden. An Englishman traveling through the United States in 1794 griped regularly about such infestations but apparently became so accustomed to them that even at an establishment which he described as "a good inn," he found that "at bed time, I was sadly tormented with bugs." Indeed, such complaints were so common that by the turn of the century they had become something of a cliché in travel writing. One diarist notified readers of his 1798 travelogue that he would dispense with such material: "I never complain of my bed," he advised, "nor fill the imagination of the reader with mosquitoes, fleas, bugs, and other nocturnal pests." Other travelers were less forbearing. An American army officer arriving at a Massachusetts tavern in 1789 was pushed beyond the limits of his patience by the "wretched bed" that awaited him. "Why," he ranted, "cannot the people of this country treat themselves at least as well as they do their brutes, & live a little more like rational beings?"
Other complaints about taverns centered on various aspects of their service, such as food quality and expense. At a time and place in which most food was locally produced, innkeepers' offerings could be limited. One wayfarer who had been served only bacon or chicken at every meal joked, "If I still continue in this way [I] shall be grown over with Bristles or Feathers." Another, echoing a frequent complaint about cleanliness, observed of his stew that "everything was so nasty that One might have picked the Dirt off." Also galling to many travelers were publicans' high prices. One man on a journey from Charleston to Philadelphia found that even at "by far the worst House we visited ... in the morning our greasy landlord ... charged us an enormous Price for the worst of Accommodations."
This is not to say that all early American public houses were of low quality. The colonies were also home to a few taverns whose keepers aspired to a higher level of refinement. In a few cases, innkeepers plied their trade in the converted mansions of the colonial elite. The most famous of these was Fraunces Tavern in New York City, which had been the residence of the merchant and politician Stephen De Lancey before Samuel Fraunces reopened it as a public accommodation. Establishments like Fraunces Tavern and the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg distinguished themselves by having more meeting rooms and offering some private quarters, but even the best of these had only a few public rooms and contained no more than fifteen or so guest chambers. A few purpose-built public houses appeared around 1770, when merchants in the largest cities financed a few more substantial establishments typified by Philadelphia's City Tavern (fig. 1.4). None of these, however, departed significantly from the basic architectural continuity of the American tavern. Publicans had clearly come to recognize the appeal of more elegant interiors, but the disruptions of the Revolutionary War and the hard times that followed limited the possibilities of the American public house for nearly a decade after the withdrawal of British forces.
THE FIRST HOTELS
In the first decade of the republic, Americans began to design and build a new generation of public houses. Hotels were very different from the public accommodations that had been in use since the beginnings of European settlement nearly two centuries before. Their size alone demonstrated that they were intended as dramatic gestures on the landscape in the same way that a mile-high skyscraper or million-seat stadium would be today. But the hotel's revolutionary character went far beyond size because hotels were also functionally and symbolically distinct from inns and taverns. The hotel was itself a project-a deliberate effort by a small commercial elite to shape the nation's future by exerting control over architectural and geographic space.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HOTEL by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz Copyright © 2007 by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz. Excerpted by permission.
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