When the Astors Owned New York Read Free Page B

exacting standards, a poor investment: carried on his books at $750,000, Astor House paid out only an annual 3 percent or so.
    As model for his venture, Astor had cast a covetous and admiring eye on the Tremont House in Boston, the nation’s first hotel built on grandiose lines for the specific purpose of being a hotel, in every modern sense of the word. For the most part, American hotels of the time had barely evolved from roadside inns and taverns in nondescript houses. Their patrons, mainly commercial travelers, had few expectations beyond basic food, drink, and shelter and a bed for the night, preferably one not shared with strangers.
    Opened in 1829, Tremont House was a white granite showpiece that gave material expression to Boston’s notion of itself as the Athens of America and its marketplace as well. A child of the new age of iron, steam, and mechanical wonders, the architect, Isaiah Rogers, virtually invented the modern hotel: a functionally complex and self-contained structure (and social organization) that was a sort of human terrarium. A closed world designed from the ground up for the specific purpose of welcoming, housing, maintaining, and feeding guests in advanced comfort, the hotel was no longer just a stop along the way: it was a destination in itself, and for some families a relatively long-term residence that anticipated the later “apartment hotel.” Tremont House was so innovative that for the next fifty years Rogers’s designs, lavishly published in book form in 1830, were the bible of hotel architecture in the United States.
    A massive, classically correct building, the four-story, 170-room Tremont House, the largest and costliest hotel of its time, presented to its guests on their arrival a majestic Doric portico, a rotunda with a stained-glass dome ceiling adapted from frescoes in the Baths of Titus, and reception halls floored with marble mosaic. Also on the ground floor were a pillared dining room seventy-three feet long with space for two hundred diners at a sitting, an open piazza, a reading room stocked with newspapers and magazines, separate drawing rooms for gentlemen and ladies, private parlors, several apartments with their own street entrances, and, Charles Dickens noted, “more galleries, colonnades, piazzas and passages than I can remember, or a reader would believe.”
    Single and double guest rooms upstairs—the $2 daily rate, exorbitant for its time, kept out all but well-to-do private citizens—offered not only comfort, security, and prestige but novel features such as a unique lock and key for each door, an annunciator system connected to the front desk, a bowl, a water pitcher, and free soap. Rogers equipped the Tremont House with indoor plumbing—eight water closets on the ground floor as well as bathrooms with running water—at a time when even the grandest Bulfinch residences on Beacon, Chestnut, and Mount Vernon streets had no indoor plumbing of any sort, relied for their needs on outhouses and chamber pots, and drew their water from sometimes polluted wells in the yard. Some Brahmin neighbors, like the grandparents of historian Samuel Eliot Morison, were grateful to be able to come to Tremont House for a weekly tub bath. By introducing and popularizing convenient bathtubs and indoor toilets, Rogers’s Boston hotel, and the public and private buildings all over the country that followed its example, had a dramatically improving effect on personal hygiene. It was also the American hotel, as time went on, that introduced still other mechanical innovations—central heating, gas lighting, incandescent lighting, telephones, elevators, air-conditioning—that became essential features of domestic life in private houses and apartments.
    Astor had an infallible sense that his city, not Boston, was to be the nation’s social and financial capital, its most cosmopolitan city. New York’s rapidly growing transient population,