A ROOM WITH VACATION,
BEST DEAL IN THE NATION
and critics were quick to point out that a visit to a cleverly reproduced landscape underneath a hotel hardly counted as a vacation, although one reporter, after catching a trout in a campground stream and cooking it over a fire outside his tent, argued that the vacations offered by the New Dressler were superior to so-called “real” vacations, since the Dressler vacation spots cost practically nothing (there were small charges for renting a canoe on the island lake, collecting firewood in the campground, having a drink in the bar of the transatlantic steamer, and so on), could be reached almost immediately and without the inconvenience and irritation of long railway journeys, and, above all, could be temporarily abandoned at night for a sound sleep in the comfort of one’s own familiar bed.
But if the fifth and sixth underground levels of the New Dressler attracted strong notice, an equal amount of attention was directed at the twelfth floor, with its series of four arched bridges over the four exterior courts. For here Rudolf Arling, following Martin’s careful instructions, had interrupted the pattern of apartments to devote the entire floor to what was called the Museum of Exotic Places — a series of scrupulously designed reproductions of such places as an Eskimo village, a Scottish glen, the Tuileries Gardens, the canals of Venice (with real water and gondolas), an archaeological dig in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Shakespeare’s birthplace, and the Amazon jungle, each lit by colored stage lights and inhabited by actors in authentic costumes, so that the visitor had the double sensation of entering an actual place and enjoying a clever artistic effect.
Other floors, it was noted, were not without their peculiarities, for on each floor of apartments was a suite of Culture Rooms, devoted to a wide variety of artistic, scientific, and historical subjects. There were reproductions of masterpieces of American and European painting by the renowned copyist Winthrop Owens, each in its precisely replicated frame; an orrery composed of transparent glass globes, illuminated from within and suspended from a starry ceiling; collections of armor, of fossils, of Egyptian artifacts; crabs and fishes in great glass aquaria; a display of Edison inventions, including the wax-cylinder phonograph, the Kinetoscope cabinet with its eyepiece and lens and its motor-turned strip of film, the carbon-filament incandescent lamp, the fluoroscope, the quadruplex telegraph, and the electric pen with its egg-sized attached motor, all surrounding a table at which sat a lifesized waxwork of The Wizard of Menlo Park, modeled after the famous photograph of the inventor leaning his head against his half-closed hand as he sat beside his phonograph at 5 P.M. on June 16, 1888, after five days without sleep; a moving panorama called A Steamboat Journey up the Hudson and Along the Erie Canal to Niagara, accompanied by sound effects such as booming thunder and steamboat whistles; and a twenty-foot wooden model of Manhattan in 1850, including not only every house, farm, hotel, church, commercial building, pleasure garden, and wharf, not only automated horsecars and omnibuses running up and down the avenues, but more than 10,000 miniature people in individual dress. These displays, designed by artists and stage designers in collaboration with members of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were intended to provide hotel guests with a wide range of culture, without the considerable inconvenience of city traffic.
Such features were described, attacked, and praised in newspaper reviews that Martin read carefully and with a certain impatience, for it seemed to him that the writers were leaving something out, something that had nothing to do with hotel architecture or the suitability of cultural attractions to a family hotel, and it was not until a long article appeared in the Architectural Record, sharply attacking the New Dressler, that Martin felt his deeper intentions had been understood.
For the writer, after praising certain features of the design, such as the pleasing division of the massive and massively ornamented facade into three parts marked by string courses, and acknowledging certain technological advances, such as the steam-powered vacuum cleaning system and the filtered cool-air system, in which air was forced by electric blowers over iron coils submerged in icy saltwater, turned his attention to the idea represented by alien elements drawn from such modern institutions as the museum, the department store, and the world’s fair. He noted the large number of theatrical elements — the actors in the twelfth-floor Museum of Exotic Places, the scenery and stage lighting in certain underground levels — which further served to remove the New Dressler from the realm of the family hotel and to give it the dubious, provisional air of a theatrical performance. The writer criticized the New Dressler as a hybrid form, a transitional form, in which the hotel had begun to lose its defining characteristics without having successfully evolved into something else, and he concluded by urging the architect to return to the problems of design posed by the modern multiple dwelling and not to succumb to the temptations of a decadent eclecticism.
Rudolf Arling was incensed by the review, which he called insolent — the corrupt hack, a lackey of the editorial board, deserved to have his neck broken — but Martin, who was uninterested in the writer’s judgment, was struck by the accuracy of his description. The writer had groped his way to the center of Martin’s intention and, without caring for what he found there, had revealed a shortcoming. For if the New Dressler was transitional, it wasn’t, Martin insisted to Emmeline, because he had strayed from the purity of a traditional apartment hotel, but rather because he hadn’t strayed far enough. He felt grateful to the attacker for revealing an error he would not make again.
“Even so,” Emmeline said, “you’ve got to admit it’s ungenerous. He simply doesn’t take a large enough view.”