Chapter Seven— Hotel Homes as a Public Nuisance
1. Veiller, "The Housing Problem in American Cities," 255-256. [BACK]
2. This review of the progressives draws primarily on Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums; Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962): esp. continue
16-41, 206-224; James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); and Davis, Spearheads for Reform . [BACK]
3. On order in a complex world, see esp. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R . (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). On housing as social order, see Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 82, 131, 214; and Ernest S. Griffith, The Progressive Years and Their Aftermath, 1900-1920 (New York: Praeger, 1974). [BACK]
4. Marie Stevens Howland and Albert Kinney Owen, in their scheme for Topolobambo, like several earlier utopian communities, included hotel life; Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution , 103-108. The conclusion section of this chapter also gives exceptions to the rule. [BACK]
5. On pluralism, see Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 187. [BACK]
6. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964): 18-74; Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974): 85-138; and Donald A. Krueckeberg, "Introduction to the American Planner," in Krueckeberg, ed., The American Planner: Biographies and Recollections (New York: Methuen, 1983): 1-36. [BACK]
7. Albion Fellows Bacon, Housing—Its Relation to Social Work , publication no. 48 (New York: National Housing Association, ca. 1919): 8. [BACK]
8. CIH, Second Annual Report (1916). [BACK]
9. On Veiller, see Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 117-118, 117-184. For an excellent profile of Chicago reformers, see Steven J. Diner, A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980): 52-64. [BACK]
10. On house diseases, see Bacon, Housing—Its Relation to Social Work , 3-4; on anemic women, see Ruth Reed, The Single Woman (New York: Macmillan, 1942); Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 83-84. [BACK]
11. Veiller, Housing Reform , 5. [BACK]
12. Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 252. [BACK]
13. On Woods, see Davis, Spearheads for Reform , 8, 24, 33-34; on Hull House and Abbott, see Diner, A City and Its Universities , 43-47, 119-153; on settlements, see Mary K. Simkhovitch, Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (New York: W. W. Norton, 1938). [BACK]
14. Mardges Bacon, Ernest Flagg: Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban Reformer (New York: Architecture History Foundation, 1986). On Burnham and this theme, see Hines, "The Paradox of 'Progressive' Architecture," 426-448, and Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). [BACK]
15. Diner, A City and Its Universities , 32, 131-132; and Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1977); see also Martin continue
Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). [BACK]
16. Veiller, Housing Reform , 5-6; Porter writes in SFHA, First Report (1911): 6, 8. On the crucible, see J. Lebovitz, "The Home and the Machine," Journal of Home Economics 3, 2 (April 1911): 141-148, on 145. [BACK]
17. See Barbara Welter's classic article, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-174, and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 191-210. [BACK]
18. "Decline and Fall of Hotel Life," 274. For a finely crafted summary of criticisms from the 1850s and 1860s, see McGlone, "Suffer the Children," 414-426. [BACK]
19. Robertson and Robertson, Our American Tour , 7-10. [BACK]
20. Wharton, The House of Mirth , 274, 276. [BACK]
21. Hayner, "The Hotel," devotes an entire chapter to women of leisure, 99-127; the quotation is on 102. Other negative comments are from Hayner, Hotel Life , 7, 55, 109-110. See also, "The True Story of a Hotel Child," quoted (without citation) in Hayner, Hotel Life , 113-114, 129. For earlier views of these critiques, see Fayès, "The Housing of Single Women," 102; and Calhoun, A Social History of the Family , 2:238-241, 3:179-182. [BACK]
22. The comments on decorating are from "Over the Draughting Board," 89-91. See also Trollope, North America , 484. [BACK]
23. Nienburg, The Woman Home-Maker in the City , 9. [BACK]
24. The hotel woman is quoted in Hayner, Hotel Life , 74-75. [BACK]
25. Howells, The Hazard of New Fortunes , 80; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , 146-165. [BACK]
26. "Over the Draughting Board." [BACK]
27. Ernest W. Burgess, "The Family as a Unity of Interacting Personalities," The Family (March 1926). On the scattering of family life, see also Hayner, "The Hotel," 55, 66, 93, 125. [BACK]
28. McGlone, "Suffer the Children," 421; Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 163. [BACK]
29. For this insight and this phrase, I am indebted to Frederick Hertz. [BACK]
30. McGlone, "Suffer the Children." [BACK]
31. Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 154-155, 161, 162. [BACK]
32. Hayner, Hotel Life , 84, 100; Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 126-129, 165. See the sharp contrast with Monroe, Chicago Families , 64, 75-77. [BACK]
33. On population proportions, see Rose, "Living Arrangements of Unattached Persons," 429-430; Ford, Slums and Housing , 768; and Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 165. On Chicago visitors, see Hunt, "The Housing of Non-Family Groups of Men," 146, 165; and Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 358. [BACK]
34. Zorbaugh, Gold Coast and Slum , 82; see also Hayner, Hotel Life , 84, and Siegal, Outposts of the Forgotten , xviii. [BACK]
35. Veiller wrote that the "most terrible of all features" of slums was "the indiscriminate herding of all kinds of people in close contact," in Deforest and Veiller, The Tenement House Problem , 1:10. Robert A. Woods and A. J. Kennedy wrote that privacy was necessary for "self-respect, modesty, order, and neatness," in Young Working Girls (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913): 41-42. For the continuation of this idea in the 1930s, see Gries and Ford, eds., Housing and the Community , 5-6. [BACK]
36. On European habits, see Breckinridge and Abbott, "Housing Conditions in Chicago, III: Back of the Yards," 450; on irregular living, see Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 316-318, 331, 335-337; on inspectors, see SFHACC, Real Property Survey, 1939 , 1:13. [BACK]
37. On the lodger evil, see Veiller, Housing Reform , 33; Modell and Hareven, "Urbanization and the Malleable Household," 467-479; Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 343, 345-346. On planners' historical views about invasion of mixed uses, see Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969): 74-75, 128. [BACK]
38. Cohen, "Embellishing a Life of Labor," 762-763. On the family room as the general purpose room in tenement units, see Cromley, "The Development of the New York Apartment." [BACK]
39. Riis, How the Other Half Lives , 1; on the need for internal and external separation, see also Veiller, Housing Reform , 109, 110-112. [BACK]
40. On beehives, E. R. L. Gould (founder of the City and Suburban Homes Company in New York), 1897, quoted in Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 110; on the open-lot house vs. row house traditions, Vance, This Scene of Man , 59-62, 121-128, 152-153; and Paul Groth, "Lot, Yard, and Garden: American Gardens as Adorned Yards," Landscape 30, 3 (1990): 29-35. [BACK]
41. On shared entries and the short cut, Bernard J. Newman, "Shall We Encourage or Discourage the Apartment House" (ca. 1917), quoted in Douglass Shand Tucci, Built in Boston , 125-126; on apartment as the polite term for tenement, Minneapolis Civic and Commerce Association, Committee on Housing, The Housing Problem in Minneapolis (Minneapolis: The MCCA, ca. 1915): 89; on domestic quality, "An Apartment House Designed in the Colonial Type," The Architect and Engineer of California 48 (February 1917): 1. [BACK]
42. Hayner, Hotel Life , 3, 7, 62. [BACK]
43. Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 85, 145, 169, esp. 171. On unmarried couples, Wolfe, 64-65, 142, and 171 (quotation on 142). On other cities, Zorbaugh, Gold Coast and Slum , 73-86; Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 327; Girls Housing Council, "Where Is Home?" 23. [BACK]
44. The personal element phrase comes from Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 173; see also, Hayner, Hotel Life , 181. [BACK]
45. Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 180, 182. [BACK]
46. Girls Housing Council, "Where Is Home?" 3, 25, 35. [BACK]
47. Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 142, 180-182; see also Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 327. [BACK]
48. CIH, Second Annual Report (1916): 226. [BACK]
49. Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 30, 32, 139, 140, 171. About larger hotels see, for instance, Howard B. Woolston, Prostitution in the United States , 139-141; Hayner, Hotel Life , 37; Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912): chap. 9. [BACK]
50. Anderson, The Hobo , 144-149; see also CSRA, Transients in California , 189. [BACK]
51. These were the greatest concerns of social reformers as published in the San Francisco newspapers of 1917; Central City Hospitality House, "Tenderloin Ethnographic Project," 17-18. [BACK]
52. Elbert Hubbard, "A Little Journey to Hotel Sherman," quoted without citation in Hayner, "The Hotel," 159. [BACK]
53. The Post is quoted without citation in Hayner, "The Hotel," 34-35. On furnished rooms, see Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 323, 337; and Hunt, "Housing of Non-Family Groups of Men," 146. [BACK]
54. Aronovici, Housing Conditions in the City of Saint Paul , 58; Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 337; Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 137; Hayner, Hotel Life , 6, 20-21, 168-170. On Arbuckle parties, Siefkin, The City at the End of the Rainbow , 118-126, and Williamson, The American Hotel , 143. [BACK]
55. The sinful amusement list compiled by the Howard Street Methodist Church in the South of Market included "dancing, playing at games of chance, attending theaters, horse races, and dancing parties"; Averbach, "San Francisco's South of Market District," 201. On dance halls, Elisabeth I. Perry, "'The General Motherhood of the Commonwealth': Dance Hall Reform in the Progressive Era," American Quarterly 37 (1985): 719-733, on 720-721; see also John Dillon, From Dance Hall to White Slavery: Ten Dance Hall Tragedies (New York: Wiley Book Co., 1912). A 1940 study reported that 60 percent of all men present in the dance halls were recent migrants to the city, most of whom lived in rooming houses; CSS, Life in One Room , 41-42. On cafés, Central City Hospitality House, "Tenderloin Ethnographic Project," 17-18. [BACK]
56. Caroline Singer, San Francisco Examiner (January 25, 1917). [BACK]
57. Byrnes, "Nurseries of Crime," 355, 360, quoted in Riis, How the Other Half Lives , 69-70. See also Devine, "The Shiftless and Floating City Population." [BACK]
58. Riis, How the Other Half Lives , 69; see also Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 137-138. [BACK]
59. Cynthia Taylor Roberts, "Stopping the Kaleidoscope: Los Angeles as Seen by Reynar Banham and Raymond Chandler" (Berkeley: unpublished manuscript, November 1981); on Los Angeles police, CSRA, Transients in California , 82. [BACK]
60. On hall bedroom loneliness, a resident quoted in Hayden, The Grand continue
Domestic Revolution , 168; on tenements and dance hall walk-bys, Fretz, "The Furnished Room Problem in Philadelphia," 95-108; and Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 31, 106. [BACK]
61. Zorbaugh, Gold Coast and Slum , 67-68; see also 82, 86, 251. On Zorbaugh's fieldwork, interview with Robert A. Slayton, then a historian with the Urban League of Chicago, in Chicago, on May 29, 1977. [BACK]
62. Zorbaugh, Gold Coast and Slum , 78-79; for the girl's entire life story, see 76-81. [BACK]
63. On suicide rates, see Hayner, Hotel Life , 4; Zorbaugh devotes a whole paragraph to rooming house suicide in Zorbaugh, "Dweller in Furnished Rooms," 87; on gas suicide, Ford, A Few Remarks , 25-26. [BACK]
64. Dreiser, Sister Carrie , 554. For other examples see Wharton, The House of Mirth , and Norris, Vandover and the Brute , 312-338. [BACK]
65. Constance Perin, Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977): 32-34; on real Americans, see Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 381. See also John Modell, "Patterns of Consumption, Acculturation, and Family Income Strategies in Late Nineteenth Century America," in Tamara Hareven and Maris Vinovskis, eds., Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978): 206-240.
Residential stability did, of course, correlate strongly with house ownership, although those who could buy houses were also those who were most skilled and more likely to be self-employed. See Clyde Griffen, "Workers Divided: The Effect of Class and Ethnic Differences in Poughkeepsie, New York, 1850-1880," in Stephen Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969): 59; and Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress (New York: Atheneum, 1971): 118. [BACK]
66. James S. Buckingham, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America (New York: Harper, 1841), 1:453, quoted in McGlone, "Suffer the Children," 417, 421; and Walter Adams, "A Foreigner's Impression of San Francisco," The Golden Era 34 (November 1885): 445. [BACK]
67. Veiller, Housing Reform , 6. [BACK]
68. On California, see Cohn, California Housing Handbook , 6; for an example of the migrant argument used against the Chinese in San Francisco, see SFHACC, Real Property Survey, 1939 , 1:8-9. [BACK]
69. Henry Wright, Rehousing Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935): 63. [BACK]
70. See, for instance, S. J. Herman, "Why Do You Live in an Apartment?" (Lansing: Michigan Housing Association Report, January 1931). [BACK]
71. On responsibility, see H. L. Cargill, "Small Houses for Workingmen," in Deforest and Veiller, The Tenement House Problem , 352; on citizenship, see Veiller, Housing Reform , 6; on mortgage control, see Hancock, "Apartment House," 152, 157-158, 182-183. [BACK]
72. Wolfe, Lodging House Problem , 106, 173. [BACK]
73. Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 335-336; see also 326-328. [BACK]
74. William T. Stead, If Christ Should Come to Chicago (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1894): 30. [BACK]
75. SFHA, Second Report (1913): 24. [BACK]
76. On interpretations of medieval and colonial period mistrust of vagrancy, see Anderson, Men on the Move , 32-33; and Robert E. Park, "Human Migration and the Marginal Man," American Journal of Sociology 18, 6 (May 1928): 881-893. Beginning in the Middle Ages, European inns were considered the favorite rendezvous of radicals, propagators of heresy, and free thinkers; Williamson, The American Hotel , 181. On interpretation of hobo subcultures, see Spradley, You Owe Yourself a Drunk , 6-7, 67; Wallace, Skid Row as a Way of Life , 129-144; Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 100-101, 322-324. [BACK]
77. Park, "Marginal Man," 887. [BACK]
78. Park, "The City," 607-608. [BACK]
79. Ernest R. Mowrer, Family Disorganization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927): 111, quoted in Monroe, Chicago Families , 67-68. On the Gold Coast, see Zorbaugh, Gold Coast and Slum , 65-68, 82, 86, 240, 249-251; on rooming houses, ibid., 248-249, 251. On Park's direct influence on his graduate students, see also Hayner, "The Hotel," 54, 176. Wolfe exhibits parallel ideas in Lodging House Problem , 100. [BACK]
80. Hayner, "The Hotel," 54. Hayner's own dissertation committee apparently filtered some of the author's distaste for hotel life. When Hayner published his dissertation as a book, he deleted most of its positive anecdotes as well as most of its logical organization. In both dissertation and book, he gave extended descriptions of unhappy hotel tenants but lightly reported busy, productive, and satisfied people—perhaps because they would not take the time to talk to sociology graduate students. [BACK]
81. Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago , 305, 307, 314, 317, 338. [BACK]
82. On New York, see Anderson, The Hobo , 151; on polite hotels, see Hayner, Hotel Life , 3-5, 72, 181. [BACK]
83. The study of one-third voting is from Anderson, The Hobo , 151, 154, based on a 1923 survey of rooming houses and the better (private room type) lodging houses. On the precinct captain, see Zorbaugh, Gold Coast and Slum , 82. See also, CIH Fifth Annual Report (1919): 34; and UC-HC, Dependent Aged , 68. [BACK]
84. Anderson, Men on the Move , 52-57; Averbach, "San Francisco's South of Market District," 201-205. In the 1870s, the outbursts were by the anti-Chinese Workingmen's Party; in 1885, 1891, and 1902, seamen fought both legally and illegally against their working conditions. [BACK]
85. Anderson, The Hobo , 150-153. [BACK]
86. On the fire (in Venice, Calif.), see CIH, Eleventh Annual Report (1925): 19. Other CIH reports: First Annual Report (1915): 80; Second Annual Report continue
(1916): 226. Also, SFHA, Second Report (1913): 24; and "Most Lodging Houses Are Perilous Firetraps," 1-8. [BACK]
87. CIH, First Annual Report (1915): 11, 78-80. [BACK]
88. SFHA, Second Report (1913): 24. In Sacramento, which served a large number of agricultural laborers, another report revealed the 33 cheapest lodging houses to be even worse, since no earthquake and fire cleared the pre-1900 buildings. Seventeen of them had no bathing facilities whatsoever; in five, cellars were illegally inhabited; CIH, First Annual Report (1915): 86. [BACK]
89. For instance, typical reports about crowded Chinese lodging houses of San Francisco blamed neither poverty nor landlords but cultural habits. See Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1939): 51; CIH, Second Annual Report (1916): 263. [BACK]
90. In San Francisco, Mayor Phelan's central landholdings are an apt example. Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums , 154-155; Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders . [BACK]
91. Monroe, Chicago Families , 84; see also 61-84. [BACK]
92. Charles G. Swanson, "Social Background of the Lower West Side of New York City" (Ph.D. dissertation at New York University, n.d. [before 1936]). [BACK]
93. Veiller, A Model Tenement House Law , sect. 2 (14-15). [BACK]