As the weather warms and the
official start of summer approaches, thoughts of travel and adventure enter the
minds of many. With travel comes the need for lodging and herein lies the great
crossroad or philosophical question as to what type of experience does one
expect in a Hotel accommodation; their home away from home? For the purely
utilitarian it is bed surrounded by four walls and in most cases it is a motel
not a hotel. For many who choose the hotel, their reasons may range from
business to pleasure with varying degrees of comfort and status associated with
the hotel’s offerings and the traveler’s desires.

The American Hotel is the
dedicated subject for the twenty-fifth issue of the Journal of Decorative and
Propaganda Arts (The Journal or JDAPA), which is published by the
Wolfsonian Museum, located in the Art Deco area of Miami Beach and managed by Florida
International University; focusing on the years 1875-1945, a time period as
Cathy Leff, the publisher and Wolfsonian-FLU director states in her Director’s
Message that is, "appropriate for studying the American Hotel".
The connection to economic, political and individual directions of that era,
now serve in part as a foundation for present practice. Guest editor, Molly W.
Berger, Instructor in the Department of History and
Assistant Dean, College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, has an extensive background and passion for this
subject and has brought together nine other scholars; compiling ten essays that
are united by subject, yet varied and diverse in their examination of the
American Hotel. This volume is comprised of essays that are arranged into three
sections.

Section one
includes the examination of Hotels from the point of view of the architect and
the developer, focusing on issues of design, ownership and management. The
essayists for this section and their respective titles are: Andrew S. Dolkart, Millionaires’Elysiums:
The Luxury Apartment Hotels of Schultze and Weaver; Molly W. Berger, The
Rich Man’s City: Hotel and Mansions of Gilded Age New York; and Lisa
Pfueller Davidson, Early Twentieth-Century Hotel Architects and the Origins
of Standardization.

Section two
unfolds the layering of social and cultural history, as evidenced by the work
of the following historians: Reiko Hillyer, The New South in the Ancient
City: Flagler’s St. Augustine Hotels and Sectional Reconciliation; Myra B.
Young Armstead, Revisiting Hotels and Other Lodgings: American Tourist
Spaces through the Lens of Black Pleasure-Travelers, 1880-1950, and A.K.
Sandoval-Strausz and Daniel Levinson Wilk, Princes and Maids of the City
Hotel: The Cultural Politics of Commercial Hospitality in America.

The last and
final section focuses on design, from identity and branding to the
"marketing" of the new to replace the old, as in the destruction of
the first Waldorf-Astoria, making room for the Empire State Building.
Collective consciousness of neighborhoods is associated with hotel architecture
and is explored within this section, emphasizing in hindsight the importance of
establishing a Landmarks Preservation Commission which according to Bernard L.
Jim, in the last essay of this volume entitled: "Wrecking the
Joint": The Razing of City Hotels in the First Half of the Twentieth
Century, did not happen in New York City until 1965, after the demolition
of the "iconic" Pennsylvania Station (290). Jim begins his
essay with references to Paramount Pictures 1942 film, " Wrecking
Crew" including the dialogue of a cavalier wrecker, who prevents a
long-time patron from entering the structure scheduled for destruction. The use
of Hollywood to sell the point that new is better than old, is still alive and
well today.

Preceding Jim’s
essay in this third and final section are three essays whose focal points all
deal with elements of design and marketing. George E. Thomas and Susan Nigra
Snyder write about William Price’s Traymore Hotel: Modernity in the Mass
Resort; Alice T. Friedman presents us with Merchandising Miami Beach:
Morris Lapidus and the Architecture of Abundance, and Mitchell Owens’, Living
Large: The Brash, Bodacious Hotels of Dorothy Draper present Draper as a
force of nature in marketing the American Home. The details of her sumptuous
public interiors were shockingly large with exaggerated moldings and trims,
bold color schemes and oversized entranceways that both commanded attention and
encouraged domestic imitation. Her interior designs became camera-ready
backdrops for photographers, and were the places to be seen, securing her place
in revolutionizing the American Hotel industry (Owens 255). Her hotel and
casino, Palácio Quitandinha (built and designed 1942-1944) in Pétropolis,
Brazil still stands today. Some may see Martha Stewart and the guest designers
at Target as descendents of Draper’s legacy, now marketing design for
everyone.

The abundant
illustrations, renderings, and historic photographs much of
which are currently  housed in the Schultze and Weaver
collection at the Wolfsonian at Florida International University–Miami Beach,
provide further evidence that the study of hotels across disciplines highlight
social and cultural themes throughout history and should encourage those
interested in this area to pursue further investigation.

The design of The
Journal, credited to Peter Roman of Inkbyte Design, needs to be
mentioned. This volume is beautifully and functionally designed allowing for
each essay to complement another, both in form and format, yet allowing each
individual essay to rise up to take the spotlight once encountered. The massive
amounts of information both as visual resources and text support the contents
of each page and provide for easy reading and acquisition of content.