THE CITY OF AMBITION
We arrived yesterday at “America’s most perfect hotel.” We are still a
little overawed. So far we have only been in hotels that have prided
themselves on being the “best hotel in the state” or the “best hotel
in the Middle West,” but Chicago’s pride throws down the gauntlet to
America, North and South, and coast to coast. I have never heard that
Chicago did anything by halves! “The world will take you at your own
valuation.” Maybe the maxim originated in Chicago.
America’s best hotel looks like a huge tower of chocolate cake
covered with confectioner’s icing. If it were cake, it might easily
be the biggest piece of chocolate in the world, but for “America’s
best”—probably because the word “best” in America has come to mean also
“biggest”—the Blackstone seems rather small. Still, I don’t think it
boasts of being anything except the finest and foremost, most perfect and
complete hotel in the Western Hemisphere.
The lobby as you enter it is very like the thick chocolate center of the
cake and gives a slightly stuffy impression that is felt in no other
part of the really beautiful interior. The cerise and cream-colored
dining-room, in which for afternoon tea they take up the center carpet
and remove some tables, leaving a hollow square of gray marble tiling to
dance on, is the most beautiful room that I have ever seen anywhere, not
excepting Paris. The white marble simplicity of the second dining-room
also appealed to me, and the upstairs halls are like those in a great
private country house.
The restaurant we find for its standard of high prices not very good.
The food at the Statler in Cleveland was the best we have had anywhere,
and the prices were half. Perhaps we ordered, by luck, the Statler’s
specialties and the dishes that the Blackstone prepares least well.
The room service, however, is well done, with a lamp under the coffee
pot and a chafing dish for anything that ought to be kept hot. Yet my
coffee this morning had a flavor not at all associated with memories of
best hotels, but reminiscent of little inns that one stops at in motoring
through France, Germany, or Italy. There should have been a sourish bread
and fresh flower-flavored honey to go with it. It leaves a copperish
taste in the mouth long afterward.
In defense of the management, I ought to add that we take our coffee at
the abnormally early hour of seven, and the coffee for such as we is
probably kept over in a copper boiler from the night before. Still, ought
this to happen in the best hotel, even if only of the Western Hemisphere?
Our rooms high up and overlooking the lake are lovely, perfectly
appointed, and with an entrancing view of moonlight on the water. The
furnishings of the bedrooms are very like those of the Ritz hotels,
and the prices are reasonable considering the high quality of their
accommodations. The three-dollar-and-a-half rooms are small, light,
and completely comfortable; for seven dollars one can have a big room
overlooking the lake, both of course including bathrooms with outside
windows and all the latest Ritz-Carlton type of furnishings, and—I must
not forget—linen sheets and pillow cases, the first real linen we have
seen since we left home! Also the reading lamp by my bed has a shade,
pink on the outside and lined with white and a generous flare, that I can
read by.
At the Statler in Cleveland there was an exceedingly pretty bed table
lamp with a silk shade on it of Alice blue and a little gold lace,
but one might as well have tried to read by the light of a captured
firefly tied up in blue tissue paper. I tried to get the shade off but
it was locked on—to prevent guests from ironing or stealing the shade
or the bulb? At any rate, since nothing could part the cover from the
fixture, and reading in the blue, glimmering gloom was impossible, I
was obliged to get to sleep by watching the members of a club in the
building opposite smoking and lounging, exactly like the drummers
downstairs—downstairs in Cleveland, not here.
The ubiquitous drummer is not in evidence as he was in northern New York,
Indiana, and Ohio. The people down these stairs are more like the people
one sees in the hotels in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. In the other
cities we have come through there were traveling men to the right of us
and traveling men to the left of us, with hats on the backs of their
heads and cigars—segars, looks more like it—tilted in the corners of
their mouths. Traveling men standing and leaning, traveling men leaning
and sitting, but always men in cigar smoke, talking and lounging and
taking their rest in the lobbies.
Like the drummers, I shall soon have all the hotels in the country at my
finger ends; the advantages, disadvantages, and peculiarities of each.
Already I could write a treatise on plumbing apparatus! The Statler in
Cleveland had an “anti-scald” device. I read about it in the “service
booklet” afterward. The curious-looking handles and levers occupying
most of a white-tiled wall at the head of the bathtub so fascinated me
that I had to try and see how they worked. I pulled knobs and pushed
buttons that seemingly were for ornament merely, until suddenly a
harmless-looking handle let loose a roaring spray of water that came
from every part of the amateur Niagara at once. My bath was over before
I had meant it to begin, and I got undressed afterward instead of
before. But I like the bathrooms with running ice-water faucets, and I
love to examine the wares in the automatic machines, also placed in the
bathrooms. They look like a miniature row of nickel telephone booths,
each displaying a bottle or box through the closed glass door, each
with a slot to drop a quarter in and a knob to pull your chosen box or
bottle out with. The tantalizing thing about them is that they hold very
little of use to me. I don’t like the kind of cold cream they carry; the
toothbrushes are usually sold out, and razors and shaving soap don’t
really tempt me.
There are paper bags in the closets to send your laundry away in and
a notice that all washing sent to the desk before nine in the morning
will be returned by five in the afternoon. If only they could run an owl
laundry, taking your things at nine in the evening and returning them
at five in the morning, it would be much more convenient for people who
arrive at night and leave in the early dawn.
I should like to make a collection of hotel signs, such as plates on the
bedroom doors saying, “Stop! Have you forgotten something?” And in the
bathroom the same sentiments and an additional “How about that razor
strop?”
* * * * *
While waiting for my change in one of the big department stores I
overheard the following conversation between two women directly beside
me:
“So you like living in the city, do you?” said one.
“Sure!” answered the other. “You can run into the stores as often as
you feel like it, and if you get lonesome you can go to the movies
or a vaudeville show, or you can walk up Michigan Avenue and see the
styles—there’s always something going on in the city.”
“I dare say you get used to it and feel you couldn’t give it up, but what
I never could get used to is one of them flats. Now out at home, we’ve
got a fifteen-room house, all hardwood floors——”
“What d’you want all that room for? You’ve only got to spend money to
furnish it and elbow grease to care for it. You need two girls or more.
Now, we’ve got a flat all fixed up nice and cozy and one girl takes care
of it easy.”
“Well, I guess it’s all right, but if I had to bring my babies out of the
good country air and put them in a flat, I think they’d die!”