Palaces of the People (April 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 2)

Palaces of the People

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Authors: J. M. Fenster

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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April 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 2

At the turn of the eighteenth century, a story went around Connecticut about a pious old woman who was berating her nephew for being such a rake. And an aging rake, at that. “But we’re not so very different,” he insisted. “Suppose that in traveling, you came to an inn where all the beds were full except two, and in one of those was a man and in the other was a woman. Which would you take? The woman’s, to be sure. Well, madam, so would I—”

Before 1829, Americans on the road stayed at inns, sleeping without privacy in the same room and even in the same bed. One timid foreigner complained that he would lie awake all night worrying about who might slide into bed with him. An Englishman, on the contrary, recalled a late night when five young ladies came into the room and began to undress for bed. “I raised my head,” he said, “and desired to be informed which of them intended me the honor of her company.” But they arranged a bedroll on the floor.

The era of jumbled accommodations closed on October 16, 1829, with the gala opening of the Tremont House in Boston. It was so radically new throughout that the most succinct description came from an English minister who hated it. Everyone else just gushed.

 
 

The Tremont House was one of the first buildings ever constructed as a hotel, and it was certainly the first one so carefully planned, with 170 guest rooms, all of them private. Breaking with the custom of receiving overnight guests in a barroom, it met them with a spacious lobby, alongside other public rooms—a massive dining room and even a library—in a classical style. Then there were the gadgets: The Tremont started a hotel tradition by making an attraction out of itself, an exposition of brand-new technology. The public rooms shone with gaslight. The guest rooms had locks on the doors. There were eight indoor toilets. And in the rooms, guests could call for either water or a bellboy just by pushing one of two buttons in the “electro-magnetic annunciator.” The electromagnetic annunciator tripped a small disk in the main office, indicating the room and the request.

 
The Plaza, an improbable château that dominates a neighborhood as does no other New York hotel, opened in 1907.
 

The Reverend George Lewis, however, looked past the clever parts of the Tremont House and recognized the even more cunning sum of its achievement: “You live in a crowd —eat in a crowd, sitting down with fifty, a hundred, sometimes two hundred at table, to which you are summoned by a sonorous Chinese gong. The only place of retirement is your room, to which you have your key.”

The Tremont House calculated an effect and then controlled it, artificially stirring the activity in the public rooms, even while