Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States

by Paul Groth

From the palace hotels of the elite to cheap lodging houses, residential hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years. Since 1870, however, they have been the target of an official war led by people whose concept of home does not include the hotel. Do these residences constitute an essential housing resource, or are they, as charged, a public nuisance?

Living Downtown , the first comprehensive social and cultural history of life in American residential hotels, adds a much-needed historical perspective to this ongoing debate. Creatively combining evidence from biographies, buildings and urban neighborhoods, workplace records, and housing policies, Paul Groth provides a definitive analysis of life in four price-differentiated types of downtown residence. He demonstrates that these hotels have played a valuable socioeconomic role as home to both long-term residents and temporary laborers. Also, the convenience of hotels has made them the residence of choice for a surprising number of Americans, from hobo author Boxcar Bertha to Calvin Coolidge.

Groth examines the social and cultural objections to hotel households and the increasing efforts to eliminate them, which have led to the seemingly irrational destruction of millions of such housing units since 1960. He argues convincingly that these efforts have been a leading contributor to urban homelessness.

This highly original and timely work aims to expand the concept of the American home and to recast accepted notions about the relationships among urban life, architecture, and the public management of residential environments.

Genres: Urbanism, History, Cities, American History, Nonfiction, Urban

423 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 1994

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Today, zoning codes (and most people, I suspect) think of hotels as wholly separate from apartments: in fact, when Airbnb began to blur the line between them by helping people rent out their houses short-term, it became very controversial. But Groth shows this separation is very recent and quite artificial: in the first quarter of the 20th century, the majority of San Francisco's hotel rooms were occupied by long-term lodgers.

Groth seeks to answer two questions: First, why were hotels so popular? High-end hotels were appealing to the upper class because the huge staffs of luxury hotels freed the rich from the need to have servants to assist with menial tasks; in addition, hotel restaurants were included in rent, and thus meant that people didn't have to worry about cooking. (As labor-saving devices reduced the need for servants and made cooking easier, I suspect this was much less of an advantage in the late 20th century). Mid-priced hotels were appealing to the middle class because they eliminated the need to buy furniture and cook meals. Hotels were especially useful for young singles who weren't ready to buy houses, because compared to boarding with a family, they were closer to downtown and allowed tenants more privacy.

And to a greater extent than modern apartments, the hotel industry created a wide range of low-end options. In the 1920s, a low-end laborer or hobo might rent a minimally furnished private room with no cooking facilities for 40 cents a night (roughly $5 today), a cubicle for half that much, and a dry space on a floor for a dime a day (or a bit over a dollar today). Of course, these facilities were vile by modern standards - cleanliness was often questionable, and dozens of tenants might share a restroom. Still, these options compare favorably to sleeping on the street as homeless people now do near where I live.

Groth then focuses on what went wrong: why did the residential hotel industry collapse? Here, he focuses primarily on the low end of the industry, which was wiped out in large part by government interference. For example:
*Building codes designed to improve sanitation put a floor under prices; for example, a hotel with one bathroom for every 15 tenants (a common 1920s standards) obviously costs a little more than one with one bathroom for every 30.
*Zoning laws that separated uses both reduced the number of hotels (by keeping them out of new, house-dominated suburban areas) and made them less appealing (by ensuring that hotels were within walking distance of less retail than in the past).
*The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) aided houses and even apartment complexes in newer areas, but did not aid residential hotels, and redlined older, mixed-use areas that such hotels were most common.
*Urban renewal wiped out many cities' lower-income downtown neighborhoods, which tended to have the most hotels. And as cities widened streets to favor the automobile, they made downtown streets less appealing places to live.
*The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill made low-end hotels very unappealing places to live, as the former patients flooded cheap hotels.
In addition, some market forces reduced demand for hotels- the growth of downtown office buildings meant that business outbid hotels for the best downtown real estate. Also as blue collar jobs moved to suburbia, blue collar people moved with them.

[Candy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating social work/ urban planning themes. Didn't get to finish it all, but was surprised by 2 connections to current events.
Back in 1910, temp workers had it hard, just like today. They could rent a "hot bed" in which another worker had just slept and left for work. Another connection is the growing trend of apartments and townhouses going up in downtown Columbus,Ohio. Urban areas were formerly mixed, then it was thought that mixing was not good, and now it is back!
When I was 3 or 4 years old, my dad rented office space on the second floor of a downtown building. There was a store downstairs, and we went up a long narrow set of stairs to the floor where his office was located. Further up, on the top floor, there were apartments where recent immigrants lived. The women would be hollering in a strange language, and foreign cooking smells would drift down the stairs. I always wondered about those people, because I never saw them. I think that is how I started being fascinated by the concept of living downtown.

[James]

Of the four hotels profiled; palace hotel, mid-price, rooming house, and flop-house; I've worked in three!

[Austin Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a past life, I lived in an old way, in an old city -- in a dwelling that was nominally classified as a "rooming house", nestled a transitory realm between middle-class residences, scattered shops, speckles of urban blight, and de-industrializing parcels of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The arrangement presented many advantages for a young, mobile worker. The house was comfortable, yet affordable, and the provision of a healthy amount of furnishings and kitchen appliances greatly reduced the burden and costs of moving halfway across a continent for an underpaid government fellowship. However, I also wonder in retrospect of the extent to which comfort in the confines of a "rooming mindset" might cabin elements of one's mental development. In the instant matter, I think especially about my capacity at the time for commitment to place and people, as well as self-emplaced restraints on one's own ultimate obligation to build their own home and household in due course.

Nevertheless, I ultimately agree with the position of the book -- that the residential hotel has been excessively maligned in the United States, to the detriment of city dwellers of all stripes, origins, occupations, inclinations, even ages -- and that cities should work to increase the number of housing options available, including residential hotels and other forms of housing like it.

If it can be helped, I would like to think that my rooming house era is over -- vis-à-vis a notion of "it's not cute anymore" at this age, as a good friend would phrase tendencies like it. Yet I believe it would still behoove the great, yet stagnant cities of the north to support housing options which make the prospect of moving less daunting for someone seeking refuge from climate catastrophe, social oppression, or political repression. In a residential hotel or rooming house, there is no need to assemble IKEA furniture, purchase a kitchen set, or even lug a mattress up flights of stairs -- at least for now.

The book can be read in full at https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpresse... ; courtesy of the UC Press E-Books Collection.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although today hotels are thought of as places for travelers, at its most basic level a hotel is simply a rented room; an apartment without a kitchen. For much of American history, the 'huddled masses' filling the cities found homes not in detached houses, but in residential hotels. Buildings giant and small, dilapidated and grand, they catered to the rich and poor alike. Living Downtown examines what lives were like, as lived in different classes of hotels, and tracks their struggle through the 20th century as they became the target of reformers. This is a social history of urban life in American cities' boomtime.

Suburbanized America thinks of apartments and the like as exceptions to the rule of privately-owned homes, but as Living Downtown reveals, communal life has a strong history in the nation. Wealthy families saw in hotels a place to enjoy servants without the bother of managing them; ambitious middle-class couples could claim a fashionable address and the opportunity to network with their betters; and the working class found a certain independence in cheap rents that allowed them to move easily in pursuit of work, or maintain lodgings even if they were laid off for a short time. Hotels ranged from grand palaces to 2-penny a day flophouses that even the indigent could afford, provided they found an odd job now and again. Hotels also offered more inherent opportunities for socialization; those midrange and above typically came with cafes, restaurants, and shops attached; the wealthy could even find rooms reserved for smoking and lounging about. Lowly flophouses wouldn't sport such facilities, of course, but they were enmeshed in an urban fabric that catered to the needs of their guests.

Living Downtown finds in hotels abounding interest. After discussing the lifestyles and attractions of the different classes of hotels, Groth moves on to hotels' place in the overall American fabric. Hotels attracted negative attention beginning the Progressive era, where helpful reformers took it upon themselves to clean up American cities and inflict morality upon them. The idea that rich society wives could lounge about in hotel parlors, not even bothering to keep house, was too much for reformers to bear, as was the inevitable use of hotels of all kinds as playgrounds for prostitution. Establishing and advancing the ideal of American society being rooted in privately-held, detached homes, the progressive era saw hotels first constricted in growth by regulation, then smothered altogether by aggressive zoning laws that would eventually attempt to deconstruct American cities, turning smartly-organized social arrangements into sprawl. Granted, there were areas that needed attention -- especially in the area of waste sanitation in poorer hotels -- but more has been lost than gained by idealistic zeal. In addition to social history, there's a little discussion of business practices.

In 21st century America, where the market for cheap housing has been all but obliterated by aggressive Federal support for welfare tenements of the kind that destroy cities, Living Downtown is a vivid reminder of the variety of housing approaches that once existed, and a look back into American cities when they were truly dynamic from the ground up.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the history of hotel living. There are a lot of pictures and building plans. The book focuses a lot on SF and the SROs and rooming houses. The book traces the development of hotel living as a reasonable, convenient way to live in an urban area. The book also discusses the historical demonization of this type of housing, in favor of single family stand alone houses, or single family apartments that have their own kitchens and bathrooms. Building codes made collective living in hotels harder. Codes favored units with bathrooms and kitchens. I really liked this book. I think it is important when we try to think about how people can live comfortably in small spaces in large dense urban areas.

[Wende · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rare history of apartment life, made even rarer by its emphasis on San Francisco rather than New York.

Coverage of the very poor and the very wealthy is excellent, as is coverage of attitudes toward apartment-dwellers. As a resident of an office-clerk style 1920s apartment at the top of the Tenderloin, though, I felt a tad invisible, as if our slice of urban life wasn't quite interesting enough to merit its own history.

[Karen Chance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very academic but very interesting.