The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

headboard was lowered to create the illusion ofspace. Furniture corners were rounded for the same reason. At the opulent end of theresidential hotel category, rooms were furnished with expensive reproductions ofeighteenth-century pieces and fireplaces were commonplace. As the Waldorf Astoria wasgoing up, dummy rooms and hallways were constructed in a warehouse off-site so thateverything down to the wall color and faucets, let alone carpets, curtains, andcabinets, could be carefully interrogated. Interiors adviser for theWaldorf Astoria, Mrs. Charles Sabis, in charge of the installations, studied the samplerooms and then accepted or rejected them; as soon as decisions were made, one dummy roomwas torn down and another went up. For some suites, Mrs. Sabis choseEnglish woodwork salvaged from a Yorkshire manor house, while pondering the eternalquestion of whether a “lacquered screen or Ming jar [was] just right for a roomwith a Queen Anne air?” Importantly, these high-end residential hotel rooms had todiffer from one another; these were no cookie-cutter chain hotels.

The rapid rise of residential hotels was in large part because of a realestate loophole: the Tenement House Act of 1901 exempted New York City’s heightand fireproofing restrictions on buildings with kitchen-less apartments. Howeverpecuniary the reason, the effect was inevitably glamorous because who would not want tolive in a full-service hotel? And even if you didn’t live in one, you could atleast imagine it every Saturday morning at “the pictures,” watching the mostrecent of the wildly popular Thin Man movies starring William Powell gliding betweenspeakeasies and residential hotels—joyously, drunkenly traversing the city, acocktail in hand. In 1903, New York hotelier Simeon Ford had made apithy declaration of difference: “We have fine hotels for fine people, good hotelsfor good people, plain hotels for plain people, and some bum hotels for bums.” Soit was only a matter of time before a new category of hotels emerged: women hotelsfor women.

The Barbizon would be the most glamorous, but it would not be the first.The first was the Martha Washington, built on a different set of premises but laying thegroundwork for the Barbizon. Opening in 1903, the Martha Washington was a squat twelvestories that stretched one city block along Madison Avenue from Twenty-Ninth toThirtieth Street. Far ahead of its time, it addressed a need for accommodations forself-supporting white-collar women when New York hotel rules stipulated that no singlefemale traveler could be offered a room after 6:00 p.m. unless she was haulinga heavy travel trunk to prove she was no prostitute. The situationcould be so embarrassing that two upper-class women “confessed to having spent thenight in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, rather than run the risk of being turnedaway from a hotel.” Even before World War I, there were women like these arrivingin New York, alone, to work. Those better off and creative in spirithad found solutions here and there, including a community of women artists who hadconverted back alley stables into spruced-up accommodations with studio spaces in whichto work. Other professional women rented tenement apartments and fixed them up inside sothey were unrecognizable from their squalid exteriors. But the revolutionary MarthaWashington became a place for these sorts of women to stay as well as a sanctuary forsuffragettes, among them Dr. Mary Walker, medical doctor and famous feminist, who likedto challenge restrictive dress codes long before flappers did. Ather wedding she refused to use the word “obey” in her vows, retained herlast name, and wore a short skirt with trousers underneath.

Despite the need for such a place, the 1903 opening of the MarthaWashington was met with all-around puzzlement at best, condemnation at worst. “Observation automobiles” full of gawkers would driveby slowly as if watching a freak show. Management itself seemed unsure of how toproceed: at first it deemed men necessary for the hotel’s heavylifting—those requisite trunks!—but a year later the male personnel werereplaced by women, now believed to be more reliable. The New YorkHerald jeered at the gender switch: the bellhop “looks demure enough inher black gown, with plain white collar and cuffs.” Moreover, no one seemed ableto wrap their heads around the idea of so many women under one roof without theprotection of men. An early brochure for the Martha Washingtonacknowledged the recurring doubts about how “it would be feasible to house solarge a number of women as four hundred to five hundred under one roof.” At the same time, the hotel’s residents were assured that the MarthaWashington was out to make a profit and not based on any “paternalism orphilanthropic idea,” like the working-class boarding houses. The residentialhotel, in other words, was intended as top-notch independent living (not charity), withan array of rooms and suites on offer, and with none of the restrictions previouslyassociated with women’s lodgings often sponsored by religious organizations, suchas curfews or no-guests rules. Residents at the Martha Washington, whether in a singleroom or a spacious apartment, could enjoy reception rooms on each floor, a roofpromenade, a dining room, modern steam heat, and mail chutes.

The kind of women who came to stay at the MarthaWashington, while initially ridiculed, soon began to enter the mainstream:Harper’s Bazaar magazine featured a series of articles in 1908 called“The Girl Who Came to the City” and the Ladies’ Home Journalfollowed three years later with “Her Sister in the Country Who Wants to Come tothe City to Make Her Way.” In 1914, New York saw a secondresidential hotel for well-off career women, the aptly named Business Woman’sHotel, built just two blocks from the Martha Washington, and six blocks from theAltman’s department store (just as the Barbizon would be built close toBloomingdale’s). Then came World War I, and the need for women’s hotelsseemed less pressing. But the end of the war initiated a building boom, andwomen’s new independence meant new clientele, more profit.

The 1920s was the decade of women’s residential hotels. TheAllerton hotel on East Fifty-Seventh Street near Central Park opened in 1920. TheAllerton was built by William H. Silk, who would soon develop the Barbizon. He and his partner, James S. Cushman, had constructed their firstbachelor apartments in 1912 and moved on to a club-hotel for men in 1919. The