The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 25

The American Hotel

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Edited by Molly W. Berger

MIT Press

Due/Published June 2005, 300 pages, paper

ISBN 1930776179

This latest volume of the groundbreaking "Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts explores the material, social and cultural world of the large American hotel. Ten richly illustrated essays look at the architects, designers and social forces that created this distinctive and complex urban institution, from Gilded Age New York to 1950s Miami Beach. Broadly imagined and yet cohesively focused, the essays examine such major historical processes as consumption and modernism and race, class and gender. Topics include the lavish New York apartment hotels of Schultze and Weaver (the architects of the Waldorf-Astoria); the connection between hotels and mansions in the "rich man's city." of Gilded Age New York; the "bodacious" interior designs of Dorothy Draper, the flamboyant Miami Beach fantasies of Morris Lepidus; Henry Flagler's St. Augustine resorts; Atlantic City's old Tray more hotel; the social world of hotel chambermaids and clerks; the parallel world of African-American "pleasure travelers"; the trend toward efficiency and standardization; and the capitalist narrative of early-twentieth-century urban hotel demolitions.