Hotel Dreaming with Molly Berger

Everyone I’ve met who has shown an interest in Hotel Dreams has a favorite hotel story. I love hearing these stories, especially from folks who have had such interesting travel experiences and are excited to share them.

 As I write this blog from Cleveland, Ohio in the summer of 2016, my city is telling its own hotel stories as it anticipates the arrival of July’s Republican National Convention. An essential part of city planning and promises has been making sure the city has adequate hotel space. Being adequate, though, is not the story; rather, being impressive is the goal. In just the last three months, three new hotels have opened in the heart of downtown. Two are restored and repurposed early 20^th century landmark buildings and the third is a shiny glass structure that projects contemporary sensibilities. As I read the enthusiastic newspaper descriptions, I was reminded of similar nineteenth-century accolades bestowed on the newest, fanciest, and most serviceable hotels of the time. Like their earlier counterparts, the new Cleveland hotels promise convenience, central location, the latest in technological amenities and comfort, and a degree of luxury that not only eases the feelings of displacement borne by travelers, but also confers a certain status on all who stay and on the city itself. Instead of boasting of indoor plumbing, central heating, and mechanized laundries, the new hotels assure travelers of wi-fi connections, 55-inch LCD TVs, and fitness rooms. What constitutes “new” technologies may have changed, but the message is the same: here is a place where you can be safe and comfortable while you enjoy modern amenities and personalized service.

Hotel Dreams explores the history of large, urban, American luxury hotels, how they served their cities as beacons of modernity, and how their architecture, mechanical systems, and systems of service inscribed contemporary ideas about progress, social organization, and particularly class, race, and gender. I have been asked many times over the years, why I found this subject interesting. I grew up in a working class family that never traveled. I can’t remember staying in a hotel until I was in my middle teens and visited my cousin in California. Nonetheless, the romance of iconic luxury hotels such as New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, Chicago’s Drake, or San Francisco’s Palace somehow had managed to imprint itself on my psyche as something glamorous and exotic, just out of grasp; accessible to others, but certainly not to me. I later came to understand it just took money and a rate sale. Armed with professional research methods, historical theory, and curiosity, I soon learned how complicated this institution is, despite most people taking hotels for granted as transparent and completely knowable buildings. Hotels are highly symbolic structures that evoke a wide range of competing ideas, often depending on whether you stay or work there, eat or sleep there. Once you’ve read Hotel Dreams, you will be armed with insights that will enable you to interpret your travels in a whole new way.

Molly W. Berger is the associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and an instructor of history at Case Western Reserve University. She is the editor of The American Hotel, an award-winning volume in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts series. Her book, Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829—1929 is now available in paperback.