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!”