Section 1 of 1891 Collection. Impressions of American Hotels by Max O'Rell. This is a liver box recording. All liver box recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit liverbox.org, reading by Ma'parard. 1891 Collection by various. Section 1. Impressions of American Hotels by Max O'Rell from A Frenchman in America.
Recollections of men and thanks. Boston January 6. A road here this afternoon and resumed acquaintance with American Hotels. American Hotels are all alike.
Some are worse. Describe one and you have described them all. On the ground floor, a large entrance hall, strewed with cuspidores for the men and a side entrance provided with a triumphal arch for the ladies. On this floor, the sexes are separated as at the puddle's baths.
In the large hall, a counter behind which solemn clerks whose business faces relax not a muscle are ready with their book to enter your name and assign you a number. A small army of colored porters ready to take you in charge. Not a salute, not a word, not a smile of welcome. The negro takes your bag and makes a sign that your case is settled.
You follow him. For the time being, you lose your personality and become number 375, as you would in jail. Don't ask questions. There's not to answer.
Don't ring the bell to ask for a favor if you set any value on your time. All the rules of the establishment are printed and posted in your bedroom. You have to submit to them. No question to ask.
You know everything. Henceforth, you will have to be hungry from 7 to 9 a.m. From 1 to 3 p.m. From 6 to 8 p.m.
The slightest infringement of the routine would stop the wheel. So don't ask if you would have a meal at 4 o'clock. You would be taken burlunatic or a crank as they call it in America. Between meals, you will be supplied with ice water at Labicum.
No privacy. No coffee room. No smoking room. No place where you can go and quietly sip a cup of coffee or drink a glass of beer with a cigar.
You can have a drink at the bar and then go and sit down in the hall among the crowd. Life in an American hotel is an alternation of the cellular system during the night and of the gregarious system during the day. An alternation of the penitentiary systems carried out at Philadelphia and at Auburn. It is not in the bedroom either that you must seek anything to cheer you.
The bed is good, but only for the night. The room is perfectly nude, not even Napoleon's farewell to his soldiers at Fompablot as in France or Strapford walking to the scaffold as an England. Not that these pictures are particularly cheerful, still they break the monotony of the wallpaper. Here the only oasis in the brown or gray desert are cautions.
First of all, I noticed that in a cupboard near the window you will find some 20 yards of coiled rope which in case of fire you are to fix to hook outside the window. The rest is guessed. You fix the rope and you let yourself go. From a sixth, seventh or eighth story, the prospect is lively.
Another caution informs you all that you must not do, such as your own washing in the bedroom. Another warns you that if on retiring you put your boots outside the door, you do so at your own risk and peril. Another is posted near the door, close to an electric bell. With a little care in practice you will be able to carry out the instructions printed there on.
The only thing wonderful about the contrivance is that the servants never make mistakes. Press once for ice water, press twice for hall boy, press three times for fireman, press four times for chambermaid, press five times for hot water, press six times for ink and writing materials, plus seven times for baggage, press eight times for messenger. In some hotels I have seen the less carried to number twelve. Another notice tells you what the proprietor's responsibilities are and at what time the meals take place.
Now this last notice is the most important of all. Woe to you if you forget it. For if you should present yourself one minute after the dining room door is closed, no human consideration would get it open for you. Supplications, arguments would be of no avail, not even money.
What do you mean? Some old fashioned European will exclaim, when the table de-hope is over. Of course you cannot expect the menu to be served to you, but surely you can order a steak or a chop. No, you cannot, not even an omelet or a piece of cold meat.
If you arrive at one minute past three in small towns at one minute past two, you find the dining room closed and you must wait till six o'clock to see its hospitable doors open again. When you enter the dining room, you must not believe that you can go and set where you like. The cheap waiter assigns you a seat and you must take it. With his superb wave of the hat, he signs to you to follow him.
He does not even turn round to see if you were behind him. Following him in all the meanders, he describes, amid the sixty, eighty, sometimes hundred tables that are in the room. He takes it for granted, new art, and obedient submissive traveler who knows his duty. All together, I traveled in the United States for about ten months and I never came across in America so daring, so independent as to actually take any other seat than the one assigned to him by that tremendous potentate the head waiter.
Occasionally, just to try him, I would sit down in a chair I took a fancy to, but he would come and fetch me and tell me that I could not stay there. In Europe the waiter asks you where he would like to sit. In America you ask him where you may sit. He is a paid servant, therefore a master in America.
He is in command, not of the other waiters, but of the guests. Several times, recognizing friends in the dining-room, I asked the man to take me to their tables. I should not have dared go by myself. And the permission was granted with a patronizing sign of the head.
I have constantly seen Americans stop on the threshold, out the dining-room door, and wait until the chief waiter have returned from placing a guest to come and fetch them in their turn. I never saw them venture alone and take an empty seat without the sanction of the waiter. The guests feel struck with awe in that dining-room, and solemnly bolt their food as quickly as they can. You hear less noise in an American hotel dining-room, containing five hundred people than you do at a French table-doubt, accommodating fifty people at a German one containing a dozen guests, or at a table where two Italians are dining, take to take.
The head-waiter at large northern and western hotels is a white man. In the southern ones he is a mulatto, or a black, but white or black. He is always a magnificent specimen of his race. There is not a ghost of a saver, of the serving-man about him, no whiskers, and a shaven upper lips reminding you of the waiters of the old world, but always a fine moustache.
The twirling of which helps to give an air of nauche-lant superiority to its wearer. The mulatto head-waitors in the south really look like dusky princes. Many of them are so handsome and carry themselves so suburply that you find them very impressive at first, and would feign apologize to them. You feel as if you wanted to thank them for kindly condescending to concern themselves about anything so commonplace as your seat at table.
In smaller hotels the waiters are all waitresses. The waiting is done by damsels entirely, or rather by the guests of the hotel. If the southern head-waiter looks like a prince, what shall we say of the head-waiterist in the east, the north, and the west? No term short of Queenly will describe her stately bearing as she moves about among her bevy of reduced duchesses.
She is evidently chosen for her appearance. She is divinely tall, as well as most divinely fair, and as if to add to her importance she is crowned with a gigantic mass of fizzled hair. All the waitresses have this waft-firo. It is a livery, as caps are in the old world.
But instead of being a badge of servitude, it looks, and is alarmingly emancipated. So much so that, before making close acquaintance with my dishes, I always examine them with great care. A beautiful mass of hair looks lovely on the head of a woman, but one in your soup, even if it had straight from the tresses of your beloved one, would make the corners of your mouth go down, and the typical nose go up. A wrinkly handsome woman always goes well in the landscape as the French say, and I have seen specimens of these waitresses so handsome and so commanding, looking that if they care to come over to Europe and play the queens in London pentamons, I feel sure they would command quite exceptional prices and draw big salaries and crowded houses.
The thing which strikes me most disagreeably in the American hotel dining room is the side of the tremendous waste of food that goes on at every meal. No European, I suppose, can fail to be struck with this, but to a Frenchman it would naturally be most remarkable. In France, where I venture to say, people live as well as anywhere else, if not better. There is a horror of anything like waste of good food.
It is to me, therefore, a repulsive thing to see the wanton manner in which some Americans will waste at one meal enough to feed several hungry fellow creatures. In the large hotels conducted on the American plant, there are rarely fewer than 50 different dishes on the menu at dinner time, every day, and at every meal. You may see people order three times as much of this food as they could under any circumstances eat, and after picking it and spoiling one dish after another, send the bulk away, uneaten. I am bound to say that this practice is not only to be observed in hotels where the charge is so much per day, but in those conducted on the European plant, that is, where you pay for every item you order.
There I notice that people proceed in much the same wasteful fashion. It is evidently not a desire to have more than is paid for, but simply a bad and ugly habit. I hold that about 500 hungry people could be fed out of the waste that is going on, as such large hotels as the Palmer House or the Grand Pacific Hotel of Chicago, and I have no doubt that such 500 hungry people could easily be found in Chicago every day. I think that many Europeans are prevented from going to America by an idea that the expense of traveling and living there is very great.
This is quite a delusion. For my part, I find that hotels are as cheap in America as an England at any rate, and railway traveling in Pullman cars is certainly cheaper than in European first-class carriages and in comparably more comfortable. Put aside in America such hotels as Delmanicas, the Brunswick in New York, the Richelieu in Chicago, and in England such hotels as the Metropole, the Victoria, the Savoy, and take the good hotels of the country, such as the Grand Pacific at Chicago, the West House at Minneapolis, the Windsor at Montreal, the Cadillac at Detroit. I only mention those I remember as the very best.
In these hotels, you are comfortably lodged and magnificently fed for from three to five dollars a day. In no good hotel of England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, would you get the same amount of comfort or even luxury at the same price, and those who require a sitting-room get it for a little less than they would have to pay in a European hotel. The only very dear hotels I have come across in the United States are those of Virginia. There I have been charged as much as two dollars a day, but never in my life did I pay so dear for what I had never in my life did I see so many dirty rooms or so many messes that were unfit for human food, but I will just say this much for the American refinement of feeling to be met with.
Even in the hotels of Virginia, even in the lunch rooms and small stations, you are supplied at the end of each meal with a bowl of water to rinse your mouth. End of Suction 1 Impressions of American Hotels by Max O'Rell