Hotel Metropole

“ It will not be seriously argued, I suppose, that the first twenty years of grand hotels have added as much ugliness to the world’s stock of ugliness as the first twenty years of railway stations. If there exists a grand hotel as direfully squalid as King’s Cross Station (palace of an undertaking with a capital of over sixty millions sterling) I should like to see it. Hotel architecture is the outcome of a new feature in the activity of society, and this fact must be taken into account. ”

“ Englishmen, shrouded in exclusiveness, who look on all their neighbours as so many barbarian intruders on their privacy; and people of all nations, whom business has drawn to the American metropolis.
The Metropolitan Hotel is the most imposing in appearance. It is a block of building with a frontage of 300 feet, and is six stories high. I believe that it can accommodate 1300 people. The St. Nicholas is the most superb in its decorations; it is a magnificent building of white marble, and can accommodate 1000 visitors. Everything in this edifice is on a style of princely magnificence. ”

“ We bid adieu to our poetical conductor, take a cross-town car, and are presently pushing at the revolving doors—a draught-excluding plate-glass turn-stile—of a vast red-brick hotel, luxurious and labyrinthine. A short colloquy with the clerk at the bureau, and we find ourselves in a gorgeously upholstered elevator, whizzing aloft to the thirteenth floor. Not the top floor—far from it. If you could slice off the stories above the thirteenth, as you slice off the top of an egg, and plant them down in Europe, they would of themselves make a biggish hotel according to our standards. ”

“ It only means that the hotels are improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side, came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women should frequent that common entrance. ”

“ Nothing, however, is to exert a vaster influence on our style than the hotel. This 'institution,' as we have it, is comparatively unknown in Europe; beyond all nations are we a travelling and hotel-building people. Our hotels have not grown up with the scant traffic of the post chaise or diligence; they overleaped that feeble infancy, and started at once with the railroad and steamboat. Large, luxurious, and well appointed, they are usually the prominent buildings in all our large cities.
But as yet it is only their size and social importance that distinguishes them, not their architecture. ”

“ It shows a handsome marble front on Broadway, with a brown stone extension on the same thoroughfare to Prince street, and extends back to Mercer street. It is handsomely furnished, and is kept on a scale of comfort and magnificence worthy of its fame. Its spacious halls and sitting-rooms, on the street floor, furnish one of the most popular lounging places in the city. Towards nightfall they are full to overflowing. The table is said, by the lovers of good living, to be the best served of any house in the city. The hotel is always full, and is very profitable to its proprietors. ”

“ It is one of the most elegant hotels in the city, in every respect. It contains about 400 rooms, and is p. 307always full. It is very popular with army officers, with Californians and the people of the mining States and Territories, as well as with the New Englanders. Capitalists and railroad managers also have a fondness for it. “Shoddy” is to be seen here also in great force.
The New York Hotel is a plain red brick structure, occupying the entire block bounded by Broadway and Mercer street, and East Washington and Waverley Places. ”

“ The almost universal defect of the older class of hotels in London is, that they are too often private dwellings extemporized for purposes of public accommodation—not buildings erected with the distinct object for which they are used. Hence the London hotels, generally, are confined and awkward in their arrangements—a huddle of apartments on different levels, narrow passages, and the offensive odour of cookery being common. Rarely is there anything to parallel the larger hotels of New York, or the Hotel du Louvre at Paris. ”

“ New York was in the worst of its subway upheaval when we landed there, but having secured a small furnished apartment in a new but obscure hotel on Forty-seventh street, Zulime and I settled down for the winter. Our tiny three-room suite (a lovely nest for a woman) was not in the least like a home for an old trailer and corn-husker like myself. ”

“ To call it "the best hotel in the world" is to show a false conception of excellence as applied to hotels, but it presented everything that German luxury could demand.
We were given a row of excellent rooms on the first floor, with long windows opening on to a terrace which roofed the great restaurant, and whence there was a noble prospect. We went to bed early, and soon the whole vast establishment seemed wrapped in velvet silence. Not a sound broke in the dark warm summer night, not even a whisper from the river. Suddenly an amazing, an unintelligible riot woke the row of us from slumber. ”

“ The “hôtels garnis” are not so good or so numerous as they were formerly; but I think them still better than our houses of the same kind in London. There is also a privacy in a french apartment (the outward door of each making a distinct habitation) , which gives it a decided advantage over the lodgings of an english hotel.
The public rooms and private cabinets of “restaurateurs,” are certainly more elegantly fitted up than the apartments of our taverns or coffeehouses. ”

“ The Grand Hotel, which occupies a large portion of one side of the Plaza, is an old-fashioned but very comfortable caravansary with flowery patios and lofty rooms, and a fore court in front, which is used as an open-air dining space. As rain seldom, if ever, falls upon this town, it is always safe to take a seat and a meal in this pleasant spot. ”

“ All over the center of London, in Piccadilly, along Hyde Park, in Bloomsbury, hotels have risen—the Piccadilly, the new Ritz, the Park View, the Coburg, the Cadogan, the Waldorf, the Jermyn Court, the Marble Arch, so many that in some places they are beginning to form a row. And still they rise. An enormous hotel is being built opposite Green Park ”

“ The ground floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge transparent cage, flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street, of which it formed a sort of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting the passersby promiscuously. The young Englishmen went in with everyone else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans along a great marble-paved corridor, with their legs stretched out, together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket office of a railway station, before a brilliantly illuminated counter of vast extent. ”

“ With what I hope may be deemed a pardonable curiosity, we peeped and sometimes stepped into these interiors, and were gratified by the neatness and even elegance which they exhibited. We found the people remarkably civil, and apparently too much accustomed to English travellers to trouble themselves about us. The hotel was not of the best class, and we only saw some very inferior cafés, consisting of one small room, with a curtain before the open door, and on the outside a rude representation, on a board, of a coffee-pot, and a cup and saucer. ”

“ THERE is a hotel on Broadway that has escaped discovery by the summer-resort promoters. It is deep and wide and cool. Its rooms are finished in dark oak of a low temperature. Home-made breezes and deep-green shrubbery give it the delights without the inconveniences of the Adirondacks. One can mount its broad staircases or glide dreamily upward in its aërial elevators, attended by guides in brass buttons, with a serene joy that Alpine climbers have never attained. ”

“ We have spacious quarters at the Station Hotel, our lattice windows opening upon a stone balcony beyond which we can see the fountain, flowers and shrubbery of the gardens, and farther away, against the purple sky, the massive yet graceful towers of the minster. How different the Station Hotel is from the average railway hotel in America can be appreciated only by one who has enjoyed the hospitality of the one and endured the necessity of staying at the other. ”

“ The two officials had reference, however, to two different grades of lodging-houses. The cost of a night’s lodging makes the difference. There is a wider gap between the “hotel”—they are all hotels—that charges a quarter and the one that furnishes a bed for a dime than between the bridal suite and the every-day hall bedroom of the ordinary hostelry.
The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth. It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague idea that they can get along here if anywhere; that something is bound to turn up among so many. ”

“ With the exception of the Washington street frontage and about 100 feet fronting on Avery street, which will be used for stores, the entire building will be devoted to the purposes of a first-class commercial hotel. On the first floor will be the office, reading-room, large public dining-room and buffet. In the basement, under the corner of Haymarket place and Avery street, there will be a rathskeller, entered both from the hotel and from the street, with the kitchens, serving-rooms, etc., in the rear, under the hotel lobby. ”

“ Of these old-fashioned hotels,—barbarous relics of another day,—few are to be found now, and, though existing in reality, are being fast robbed of their clientièle, which demand something more in the way of conveniences—with no diminution of comforts—than it were possible to get in the two or three private houses thrown into one, and dubbed by the smugly respectable title of "Private Hotel." ”

“ This first hotel was the Pleasant Street Hotel, built around 1800 on East Street where the current fire house is. High Street was the northern way out of town at that time. Bootman's Store was across from the hotel. ”

“ The proprietors have availed themselves of all the latest ideas in the construction and furnishing of hotels, and nothing that money can supply, or good taste can suggest, has been left undone to make the Métropole at Brighton what it is—one of the most beautiful and luxurious hotels in the world. ”

“ The concept of a hotel in his native city of Chicago was a steel structure of many stories, brilliantly lighted and decorated, supplied with a lightning elevator service running through the polished marble halls which swooned in a tropical atmosphere of steam heat emanating from silvered radiators. So it was no wonder that the young man felt more at home in this inn in old London than he had ever felt in an American caravansary. ”

“ There are grander hotels in the world than the Grand Hotel of Paris,—but it is only in Paris that the Grand Hotel is matched and fronted in every direction by houses which in style and architecture correspond with the hotel. ”

“ It must be recalled that the fashionable, or rather the modern up-to-date hotel, with its elaborate table d’hôte, is much the same wherever found; and that an inland spa or a watering-place on the Mediterranean coast of France, or at Ostend, Dieppe, or Trouville, does not differ greatly from an establishment of the same class in Paris, London, or New York. ”

“ CHAP. IV.—THE CAPTAIN'S ROOM.
The hotel of the Northern Eagle, situated in one of the most respectable of the numerous small streets between the Rue St Honoré and the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, is one of several hundred establishments of the class, scattered over Paris, and which, although bearing the ambitious title of "hotel," differ in no essential respect from what in London are styled third or fourth-rate lodging-houses. ”

“ But if a pot of tea had to be carried a quarter of a mile in a grand hotel, from the kitchen to a bedroom, people would say, “How absurd!” or, “How stewed!” The “layer” system of architecture is from all points of view indispensable to the grand hotel, and its scenic disadvantages must be met by the exercise of ingenuity. There are other problems confronting the hotel architecture, such as the fitting together of very large public rooms with very small private rooms, and the obligation to minimise externally a whole vital department of the hotel (the kitchens, etc.) ”

“ I have lived at all these houses, also at the Hotel del Coronado, Coronado Beach, and at California’s other famous house, the Hotel del Monte, at Monterey, with its 126 acres for a garden. There are few or none that are more gorgeous than these, and they always come to one’s memory when discussing the best hotels, but certainly New York City cannot boast of a hotel interior that equals in tasteful decorations those of the Bristol in London. ”

“ The individual hotel has developed into a complex institution, often of colossal size, supplying board and lodging on a most luxurious scale. In all parts of New York State, particularly in the smaller cities and towns, the small hotel with the inn tradition, with a simple table d’hôte service at one rate, still exists. But the tendency in New York City and in first and second class cities of the State has been toward a rapid expansion in the size of the individual establishment with an elaboration of service, and a specialization of hotel types. ”