THE AMERICAN SPA DEVELOPS

Toward the end of the Nineteenth Century a large sprinkling of luxury resort hotels dotted the American scene. Americans, hungry to develop an "instant aristocracy" based their elitist views on money rather than family. The newly rich, sometimes identified in a body as the nouveau riche, have historically been categorized as fairly coarse seekers of the old, landed, and genteel European traditions. What these newly rich Americans did was to tour Europe in the manner best described in Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, and while literally horrifying their European hosts with crass, almost frontier-like ways, literally "bought" some of the best of European artifacts which represented the Americans' idea of culture. It was not unusual for entire libraries to be moved to the home of a newly rich American who could not read a word of the language in which his books were printed. The Americans moved castles, stone by stone, brought-over priceless works of art and heraldic coats of arms. The quest was on for Americans to "buy their way in." Americans are still importing artifacts today, but for other reasons, primarily promotional skilled chefs were imported along with their sophisticated French culinar; art (and even with their cooking tools) to serve up gastronomic delights to the Americans at many of Saratoga's fine establishments. Restaurants developed their own house specialties and, in every case, copied the European cuisine.

The same sort of thing was going on elsewhere. In America's South, the White Sulphur Springs Hotel and resort community fulfilled the same hunger for an instant aristocracy. "The White," as this hotel was affectionately called, was located in the midst of lush greenery "surrounded by beautiful mountains. The register of the White Sulphur Springs Hotel listed large numbers of the South's social elite.

Yet another version of American aristocracy, Colorado Springs, near the base of Pike's Peak, affected an old English gentility with its Georgian style casino and hotel complex, the Broadmoor. As with the other resorts, the Broadmoor attracted notable people from all over the world. Exotic dishes prepared by famous chefs included smoked elk, fresh trout, and strawberry shortcake. Going further to the West, we could have visited, at the end of the last century, the Honterey Peninsula's Hotel del Monte; and in Coronado, a few miles from Old Mexico, was situated the stately Hotel del Coronado, even today a prominent landmark in San Diego. Traveling back to the Eastern Sea­board, we could have started at New York's Niagara Falls, and then moved to the coast, visiting first The Ocean house of the New Jersey coast, the several resorts of Atlantic City, where so many New Yorkers played, and closer to home for them was Coney Island, which many decades ago was something like Atlantic City in its hotel facilities. Those who could afford both the time and the money took trips down to Palm Beach, Florida; Miami Beach had not yet been "discovered."

 

COMMERCIAL HOTELS DEVELOP

Almost simultaneous with the development of the resort spa was the rise of hotels for the commercial traveler. Hotel magnates of the time came to grips with this increasing demand for accommodations and to meet the market provided a very high level of hospitality. The tourist and vacationing middle class, too, joined the scene. As the railroads expanded and headed in a myriad of directions, an increasing flow of travelers, mostly commercial men at first, began to penetrate the nation's hinterlands. In the ensuing competition for the commercial traveler's dollar, many hotels set up "sample rooms" to entice traffic their way. Hotels often provided free transportation to their guests arriving and departing from railroad stations. Special horse-drawn multi-seated wagons were used for this service. These omnibuses, as they were called* resembled wagons more than stagecoaches and served admirably the purpose of carrying guests and their luggage between the railroad depot and the hotel.

 

STATLER'S FIRST HOTELS

Recognizing that the commercial traveler was part of a newly emerging market which included the middle class traveler, Ellsworth M. Statler at the turn of the century provided a response to the needs of the middle class traveler. His first hotel 1n Buffalo (1908), the Buffalo Statler, opened new horizons for the American hotel industry by setting higher standards of excellence than those of Statler's contemporaries. The middle-class traveler was offered conveniences and surroundings which seemed almost out of keeping with the rates charged. With an appeal to the masses, he created advertisements for his new Buffalo hotel which sounded somewhat like today's advertising jingles: "A room with a bath for a dollar and a half." With this approach, he was able to achieve a very high occupancy rate for his Buffalo hotel.

Among Statler's innovations at the Buffalo Statler was the industry's first circulating ice water in every room, light switches installed just inside the front doors to eliminate groping in the dark, and a towel hook beside each bathroom mirror. He hired an interior decorator to color-coordinate his rooms, thus matching drapes, bed-spreads, and carpets to provide a restful, yet colorfully harmonious room to the often weary traveler.

Statler Hotels soon became the model for virtually all hotel construction for the next thirty years. He had found the key to "turn on" the middle class traveler. The early dominance of Statler in the hotel business set a pattern which was to be the most copied model for American hotels for years to come; in fact, it is only with the advent of the large motel/airport complex that we have started to emerge from Statler's direct influence and enter a new era of mobility, an era unforeseen by turn-of-the-century entrepreneurs.

As America entered the Twentieth Century, land values rose dramatically along with a greater dependence upon rail transportation; the hotel business shot skyward—1iterally. In New York, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Belmont, and the venerable Plaza became a part of the early New York skyscraper scene from Central Park to the East Side. In Chicago, much the same thing was happening. Early in the century, Chicago was the rail hub of the United States and more trains entered and left that city than anywhere else in the world. A traveler from New York to San Francisco would take the New York Central or Pennsylvania 18-hour express trains from New York to Chicago, and if in a hurry, make a connection with the West Coast trains; if he had time, the traveler would "lay over" for a few days' rest in Chicago, perhaps conduct some business, attend a play at the Erlanger, shop at Field's, and certainly stay at one of Chicago's downtown skyscraper hotels, the Palmer House, La Salle, Morrison, or Congress. By 1913, he could stay at the newly built Edgewater Beach on Chicago's lakeshore and enjoy both the cosmopolitan life and the atmosphere of a lakeside spa. With all of these developments, Statler reacted to the competition by another surge of building.

Statler's Pennsylvania Hotel, built in 1910, was billed as the world's largest hotel. Located directly across the street from New York's Pennsylvania Station, it attracted a large clientele and was virtually a city within a city. This hotel marked the beginning of a new wave of hotel construction in America.

From 1910, with Statler's Pennsylvania, a new market need was both being generated and met. The forces producing the market, once again, were traceable to the continuing development of the American railroading industry, along with a growing concern with the troubled times ahead; the rumblings of the First World War were felt in many ways and produced a ferment in America which was to persist as the country courted empire-building goals.

 

 

An example in the decade of the 1970's is an American industrialist's acquisition of the London Bridge, brought over stone by stone and laid out again in the Arizona desert, with, finally, a river brought to the bridge, rather than the other way around. This trend toward the acquisition of ancient artifacts started in the mid-1800's and continues today with little let-up.

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It was in this setting tffat the American spa, or watering place, developed. The most prominent of these was the community of Saratoga in New York. Here, in the 1860's and 1870's, parasoled and bustled ladies, escorted by top-hatted men, strolled and basked in the warmth of their newly bought aristocracy, talking about social events of the time.

The names of Vanderbilt, Gould, Lorillard, and Wanamaker were said to have appeared on the register of the famous United States Hotel in Saratoga in the 1870's. The Saratoga spa included not only mineral baths, but many of the accoutrements which Americans had seen abroad. There was gambling in the style of Monte Carlo, rather than in the raucous manner of the American West; horse racing with all of the paraphernalia associated with English culture was brought to Saratoga;