Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making, and a great number of people have been essential catalysts in the process. My initial introduction to both the problems and the possibilities of hotel living came from Richard Livingston in San Francisco's Cadillac Hotel. James Vance and Allan Pred agreed that hotel life could be a dissertation topic in historical geography. Gunther Barth rightly saw the topic as cultural history and generously aided the early phases of the work. Pierce Lewis's enthusiasm for the built environment kept the buildings themselves at the center of the study. Clarence Glacken's encouragement in studying ideas helped to link the physical and human elements of the story. Dell Upton set admirable standards and has been a good friend both to me and to the project. By his example and advice, John Brinckerhoff Jackson has shown that the cultural meaning of the environment must be studied in terms of its inhabitants.

Deserving special mention are other readers who have slogged through the entire manuscript in one of its preliminary forms: James Borchert, Barrie Greenbie, Jaime Kooser, Richard Longstreth, Judy Metro, Bradford Paul, and Richard Walker. At critical points, the ideas and encouragement of Christine Rosen, Tamara Hareven, Donald Meinig, and my editor, Stanley Holwitz, kept the project afloat. Others

who read parts of the manuscript and injected timely suggestions include Kenneth Ames, Catherine Bishir, Betsy Blackmar, Jim Buckley, Lizabeth Cohen, Michael Conzen, Elizabeth Cromley, Robin Einhorn, Cliff Ellis, James Gregory, Neil Harris, Tom Harvey, Frederick Hertz, Thomas S. Hines, Deryck Holdsworth, Gary Kulik, Margaretta Lovell, Larry McDonald, Michael Laurie, Earl Lewis, Clare Cooper Marcus, Michael Smith, Jean Spraker, Kim Voss, Christopher Yip, and Wilbur Zelinsky. Dorothée Imbert converted my rough sketches into elegant drawings; Marc Treib lent valuable design advice. Roger Montgomery good-naturedly combined intellectual challenges with dire deadline warnings.

Specialists in housing history and hotel activism have also donated essential help. Robert Slayton and Charles Hoch graciously agreed to exchange early drafts of their manuscript for New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel . Karen Franck, Joanne Meyerowitz, and Paul Rollinson also shared early drafts of their work. Michael Pyatok, Ron Sillimon, and Mike Estrada have challenged me with news from the hotel activists' trenches. Richard Penner of the Cornell School of Hotel Management advised me on palace hotels. In New York City, I owe thanks to Carroll Kowal, a pioneer in the fight to preserve hotel housing, and also to three people in the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Colleen Myers, Robert Trobe, and Steve Norman, who literally opened doors in the Bowery.

For the time to draft the book manuscript in 1985–86, I owe thanks for a National Endowment for the Arts Museum Fellowship from the Office of Advanced Study at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum and Gardens and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. At the University of California, Berkeley, the Committee on Research supported graduate research assistants who were willing to find the answer to any question. Some worked for a few weeks, others for a semester. They are Bob Adams, Jim Buckley, George Henderson, Greg Hise, Douglas MacDonald, Louise Mozingo, Mark O'Malley, Adriana Petryna, Liz Vasile, Diane Shaw, and Lesley Watson. Other key assists came from Travis Amos, Anne Bloomfield, Frances Butler, Douglas Brookes, Don Coppock, Miriam Dobkin, Scott Dowdee, Claudia Farnswick, Brian Godfrey, Daniel Gregory, Kate Hutchins, Karen Kevorkian, Daniel Krummes, Dave Larson, Ellen Liebman, Bonnie Loyd, Patrick Macey,

Arthur Morris, Lucille Oberlander, Louise Quenneville, Gail Radford, William Savidge, Sylvia Shive, and Scott Wirth.

The keepers of photo collections were gracious and helpful: Linda Ziemer at the Chicago Historical Society, Patricia Paladines at the New York Historical Society, and particularly Marguerite Lavin at the Museum of the City of New York and Patricia Akre of the San Francisco History Room, San Francisco Public Library. For their help with other document collections, my thanks to Estelle Rebec of the Manuscripts Division, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Eleanor McD. Thompson, Winterthur Library; Samuel Duca, Assessor of the City and County of San Francisco, and his staff; Robert C. Levy and Peter Burns of the San Francisco Bureau of Building Inspection; Robert Vasconcellos, Denise Davilla, and the staff at the San Francisco Water Department; Mary Catherine Haug-Boone and Peter Theodor of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency; Michael Corbett and Eric Sandweiss of the Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage; and Mary Smyth at the Alice Statler Hotel Management Library, City College of San Francisco.

If this book serves to fight public misunderstanding, it is because all these people have helped to counteract my own.