Nobody Asked Me, But… No. 266: Hotel History: The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, California

Posted on June 27, 2022 by Stanley Turkel

Nobody Asked Me, But… No. 266: Hotel History: The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, California

Stanley Turkel | June 01, 2022

by Stanley Turkel, CMHS

Hotel History: The Palace Hotel (1909), San Francisco, Ca (556 rooms)

San Francisco and the Palace Hotel have shared a common heritage for more than 140 years. Inspired by a visionary developer, William Chapman Ralston, the Palace Hotel was known as the “Grande Dame of the West”, a hotel of timeless elegance and unprecedented opulence. It was designed by architect John P. Gaynor as the largest, costliest and most luxurious hotel in the world. To finance its $5 million cost, Ralston exhausted his Bank of California which collapsed in late August 1875. Soon thereafter, Ralston’s body was found floating in San Francisco Bay. Nevertheless, the Palace Hotel opened two months later on October, 1875. Nevada’s U.S. Senator William Sharon, one of Ralston’s partners, who was known as the “King of the Comstocks” ended up in control of the hotel when he paid off the Bank and Ralston’s debts with pennies on the dollar.

San Francisco and the Palace were both destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906. Before that tragedy, the original hotel featured the Grand Court, the carriage entrance which was surrounded by seven floors of balconies bedecked in tropical plants and lighted by hundreds of gas jets and was paved in marble and roofed in opaque glass. The guests were distinguished: Don Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil; King David Kalakaua, the last King of Hawaii (who died at the Palace Hotel); Rudyard Kipling, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Enrico Caruso. Guests were awed by the hotel’s four hydraulic elevators known as “rising rooms”. Each room was equipped with an electric call button so that every guest request could be met quickly and completely.

The following Proclamation was circulated by Mayor E.E. Schmitz:

Proclamation By The Mayor

The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to KILL any and all persons found engaged in Looting or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.

I have directed all the Gas and Electric Lighting Co.’s not to turn on Gas or Electricity until I order them to do so. You may therefore expect the city to remain in darkness for an indefinite time.

I request all citizens to remain at home from darkness until daylight every night until order is restored.

I WARN all Citizens of the danger of fire from Damaged or Destroyed Chimneys, Broken or Leaking Gas Pipes or Fixtures, or any like cause.

E. Schmitz, Mayor
April 18, 1906.

After the earthquake and fire, it took three years of rebuilding under the supervision of the architectural firm Trowbridge & Livingston (who were renowned for the St. Regis Hotel, the Knickerbocker Hotel, and the B. Altman & Company department store in New York). To keep the tradition of the Palace alive, a small wooden “Baby Palace” hotel was quickly constructed a few blocks from the ruined hotel. It had twenty-three rooms and was managed by Ernest Arbogast, the renowned chef of the original Palace Hotel. When the Palace Hotel reopened in 1909, it featured the Maxfield Parrish 16-foot mural “The Pied Piper of Hamlin” which is displayed to this day in the Pied Piper Bar. The carriage entrance was transformed into the Garden Court, one of the world’s most beautiful public places and prestigious dining room.

The following summary describes some of the unusual events and famous people who stayed at the Palace Hotel:

1915: Thomas Alva Edison, the wizard of electricity, was honored by Northern California Telegraph Operators. Menus were prepared in Morse Code and orders were placed with telegraph keys along wires strung from table on miniature telegraph poles.
1919: President Woodrow Wilson hosted two luncheons in support of the Versailles Treaty which ended World War I.
1923: Warren G. Harding’s term as President ended suddenly when he died at the Palace Hotel after suffering from food poisoning while cruising the Alaska Coast aboard the presidential yacht.
1927: Colonel Charles Lindbergh, acclaimed as a hero because of his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, flew to San Francisco to encourage the development of commercial aviation and construction of airports. He was honored with a major banquet at the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel.
1934: “The Pied Piper of Hamlin”, a famous painting by Maxfield Parrish was returned to the Palace Hotel bar after fourteen years of storage at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum during Prohibition.
1935-1943: Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt were guests at the Palace as well as Don Ameche, Cesar Romero, Douglas Fairbanks, Loretta Young, Tyrone Power, Daryl Zanuck and Bob Hope.
1943: San Francisco honored Madame Chiang Kai-shek at a magnificent banquet at the Palace Garden Court.
1954: Ernest Henderson, president of the Sheraton Corporation purchased the Palace Hotel and renamed it the Sheraton-Palace. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev spoke at a banquet at the Sheraton-Palace during his American tour in 1959.
1973: Sheraton sold the Palace to the Japanese Kyo-Ya group along with all their hotels in the Hawaiian Islands but continued to manage them.
1989: The Sheraton-Palace Hotel closed for extensive renovation and reopened as the Sheraton Palace (no hyphen) following a $150 million restoration.
1990: The hotel dropped the Sheraton name by its new owner Starwood Hotels and became part of the Luxury Collection as the Palace Hotel.
1991: Visitors were delighted with the results of the restoration by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, chief architects for the project and Page & Turnbull, specialists in historic restoration. The restored Garden Court, according to architectural critic Allan Temko “is not only the most resplendent room in San Francisco, but one of the largest… There are some 25,000 individual panes in the immense translucent skylight, arranged in 692 geometric panels, and every one of them has been taken down, cleaned, mended where necessary, and replaced in a rebuilt armature under a handsome new outer skylight.” Another writer placed the number of pieces of stained glass in the four-story dining room’s ornamental dome at 70,000. The restored room was highlighted by ten 700-pound crystal chandeliers. On the fourth floor was a glass-domed swimming pool and health spa.
1997: The David Fincher film The Game, starring Michael Douglas, was shot in the Garden Court.
2015: The hotel received an extensive renovation to its guest rooms, indoor pool, fitness center, lobby, promenade and the one and only Garden Court.

A review of the Palace grillroom in the late 1890s that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle was true then and, even more so, in 2016:

“Comparison? Well, there is none, for the reason that the grill room has no competitors; it has only imitators. The Palace grill room came first… then the globe trotters discovered it, and they carried its fame to the four corners of the earth… and the imitators fell into line.

The Palace grill is the fin de siècle in café, restaurant cuisine in America. It has no peer, and the zest of the Grill Room steak would bring Chateaubriand from his grave… Over its silver-framed tables and beneath its white ceiling and glittering chandeliers the great world meets to eat, to drink and talk. It has brought famine to half the club dining rooms…”

The Palace Hotel is a member of the Historic Hotels of America and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

All of my following books can be ordered from AuthorHouse by visiting stanleyturkel.com and clicking on the book’s title:

Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2009)
Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York (2011)
Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi (2013)
Hotel Mavens: Lucius M. Boomer, George C. Boldt, Oscar of the Waldorf (2014)
Great American Hoteliers Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2016)
Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels West of the Mississippi (2017)
Hotel Mavens Volume 2: Henry Morrison Flagler, Henry Bradley Plant, Carl Graham Fisher (2018)
Great American Hotel Architects Volume I (2019)
Hotel Mavens: Volume 3: Bob and Larry Tisch, Curt Strand, Ralph Hitz, Cesar Ritz, Raymond Orteig (2020)
Great American Hotel Architects Volume 2 (2020)

If You Need an Expert Witness:

Stanley Turkel has served as an expert witness in more than 42 hotel-related cases. His extensive hotel operating experience is beneficial in cases involving:

slip and fall accidents
wrongful deaths
fire and carbon monoxide injuries
hotel security issues
dram shop requirements
hurricane damage and/or business interruption cases

Feel free to call him at no charge on 917-628-8549 to discuss any hotel-related expert witness assignment.

ABOUT STANLEY TURKEL

Stanley Turkel was designated as the 2020 Historian of the Year by Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He had previously been so designated in 2015 and 2014.

This award is presented to an individual for making a unique contribution in the research and presentation of historic hotels and whose work has encouraged a wide discussion of greater understanding and enthusiasm for American History.

Turkel is the most widely-published hotel consultant in the United States. He operates his hotel consulting practice serving as an expert witness in hotel-related cases. He is certified as a Master Hotel Supplier Emeritus by the Educational Institute of the American Hotel and Lodging Association.

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Nobody Asked Me, But… No. 265: Hotel History: The Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA)

Posted on June 27, 2022 by Stanley Turkel

by Stanley Turkel, CMHS

Hotel History: The Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA)

The Asian American Hotel Owners Association is a trade association that represents hotel owners. As of 2022, AAHOA has approximately 20,000 members who own 60% of the hotels in the United States and are responsible for 1.7% of the nation’s GDP. More than one million employees work at AAHOA member-owned hotels, earning $47 billion annually and provide 4.2 million U.S. jobs across all sectors of the hospitality industry.

Indian Americans in the hotel and motel industry early on faced discrimination, both from the insurance industry and from competitors placing “American owned” signs outside their properties to take business from them. Another group of Indian hoteliers was created in Atlanta in 1989 to address discrimination issues and increase awareness of Asian Americans working in the hospitality industry under the name Asian American Hotel Owners Association.

The Asian American Hotel Owners Association was originally founded to fight racism. As early as the mid-1970’s, Indian Americans hoteliers faced discrimination from banks and insurance carriers. Around that time, after delegates to a regional fire marshal’s convention reported that Patels had set fire to their motels and submitted phony claims, insurance brokers refused to sell insurance to Indian owners.

To fight this problem and other forms of discrimination, the Mid-South Indemnity Association was formed in Tennessee. It grew nationwide and eventually changed its name to the INDO American Hospitality Association. Another group of Indian hoteliers came together in Atlanta in 1989 also to address discrimination issues and to increase awareness of Asian Americans in the hospitality industry. With the help of Michael Leven, then president of Days Inn of America, they formed the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. By the end of 1994, these two groups merged with the following mission:

AAHOA provides an active forum in which Asian American hotel owners through an exchange of ideas with a unified voice, can communicate, interact, and secure their proper position within the hospitality industry, and be a source of inspiration by promoting professionalism and excellence through education and community involvement.

The new owners brought their business expertise and their families to operate these motels. They instituted modern accounting techniques to monitor the all-important cash flow. Four times cash flow became the mantra of the Patels. If the distressed motel produced $10,000 per year in revenues and could be acquired for $40,000, it was profitable to a hard-working family.

They renovated and upgraded rundown motels to improve cash flow, sold the properties and traded up to better motels. This was not without difficulties. Conventional insurance companies wouldn’t provide coverage because they believed these immigrant owners would burn down their motels. In those days banks were unlikely to provide mortgages either. The Patels had to finance each other and self insure their properties.

In a July 4, 1999 New York Times article, reporter Tunku Vardarajan wrote, “The first owners, in a manner consistent with many an emergent immigrant group, scrimped, went without, darned old socks and never took a holiday. They did this not merely to save money but also because thrift is part of a larger moral framework, one that regards all nonessential expenditure as wasteful and unattractive. It’s an attitude buttressed by a puritanical aversion to frills and frivolities, one that has its roots as much in the kind of Hinduism that the Patels practice as in their historical tradition as commercial perfectionists.”

Author Joel Millman writes in The Other Americans Viking, 1997, New York:

Patels took a sleepy, mature industry and turned it upside down- offering consumers more choices while making the properties themselves more profitable. Motels that attracted billions in immigrant savings turned into real estate equity worth many billions more. That equity, managed by a new generation, is being leveraged into new businesses. Some are related to lodging (manufacturing motel supplies); some related to real estate (reclaiming derelict housing); some simply cash seeking an opportunity. The Patel-motel model is an example, like New York’s West Indian jitneys, of the way immigrant initiative expands the pie. And there is another lesson: as the economy shifts from manufacturing to services, the Patel-motel phenomenon demonstrates how franchising can turn an outsider into a mainstream player. The Gujarati model for motels might be copied by Latinos in landscaping, West Indians in homecare or Asians in clerical services. By operating a turnkey franchise as a family business, immigrants will help an endless stream of service providers grow.

As investment and ownership expanded, the Patels were accused of a wide variety of crimes: arson, laundering stolen travel checks, circumventing immigration laws. In an unpleasant burst of xenophobia, Frequent Flyer magazine (Summer 1981) declared, “Foreign investment has come to the motel industry…..causing grave problems for American buyers and brokers. Those Americans in turn are grumbling about unfair, perhaps illegal business practices: there is even talk of conspiracy.” The magazine complained that the Patels had artificially boosted motel prices to induce a buying frenzy. The article concluded with an unmistakable racist remark, “Comments are passed about motels smelling like curry and dark hints about immigrants who hire Caucasians to work the front desk.” The article concluded, “The facts are that immigrants are playing hardball in the motel industry and maybe not strictly by the rule book.” The worst visible manifestation of such racism was a rash of “American Owned” banners displayed in certain hotels across the country. This hateful display was repeated in post- Sept 11 America.

In my article, “How American-Owned Can You Get”, (Lodging Hospitality, August 2002), I wrote,

“In post-Sept. 11 America, signs of patriotism are everywhere: flags, slogans, God Bless America and United We Stand posters. Unfortunately, this outpouring sometimes oversteps the boundaries of democracy and decent behavior. After all, true patriotism encompasses the best features of our founding documents, and the very best of America is reflected in its diversity. Conversely, the worst if reflected when any one group attempts to define “American” in their own image. Unfortunately, a few hotel owners have attempted to describe their own peculiar version of “American.” When at the end of 2002 the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City installed an entrance banner saying “an American-owned hotel,” the owners attempted to deflect criticism by explaining, “The issue of American-owned is basically not disparaging toward other hotels. We want to provide our guests with an American experience. We want people to know they are going to get an American experience. We are not really interested in what the other hotels are or what they are not.”

This explanation is as wrongheaded as it gets. What is an “American experience” in a country that prides itself on its cultural diversity? Is it only white bread, hot dogs and cola? Or does it encompass all the arts, music, dance, food, culture and activities that various nationalities and citizens bring to the American experience?

In 1998, AAHOA Chairman Mike Patel announced to the hotel industry that the time had come to identify AAHOA’s 12 Points of Fair Franchising. He said that the major purpose was “to create a franchising environment that promotes equality and is mutually beneficial to all parties.”

AAHOA’s 12 Points of Fair Franchising

Point1: Early Termination and Liquidated Damages

Point 2: Impact/ Encroachment/ Cross Brand Protection

Point 3: Minimum Performance & Quality Guarantees

Point 4: Quality Assurance Inspections/ Guest Surveys

Point 5: Vendor Exclusivity

Point 6: Disclosure and Accountability

Point 7: Maintaining Relationships with Franchisees

Point 8: Dispute Resolution

Point 9: Venue and Choice of Law Clauses

Point 10: Franchise Sales Ethics and Practices

Point 11: Transferability

Point 12: Sale of the Franchise System Hotel Brand

All of my following books can be ordered from AuthorHouse by visiting www.stanleyturkel.com and clicking on the book’s title:

Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2009)
Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York (2011)
Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi (2013)
Hotel Mavens: Lucius M. Boomer, George C. Boldt, Oscar of the Waldorf (2014)
Great American Hoteliers Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2016)
Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels West of the Mississippi (2017)
Hotel Mavens Volume 2: Henry Morrison Flagler, Henry Bradley Plant, Carl Graham Fisher (2018)
Great American Hotel Architects Volume I (2019)
Hotel Mavens: Volume 3: Bob and Larry Tisch, Curt Strand, Ralph Hitz, Cesar Ritz, Raymond Orteig (2020)
Great American Hotel Architects Volume 2 (2020)

If You Need an Expert Witness:

Stanley Turkel has served as an expert witness in more than 42 hotel-related cases. His extensive hotel operating experience is beneficial in cases involving:

slip and fall accidents
wrongful deaths
fire and carbon monoxide injuries
hotel security issues
dram shop requirements
hurricane damage and/or business interruption cases

Feel free to call him at no charge on 917-628-8549 to discuss any hotel-related expert witness assignment.

ABOUT STANLEY TURKEL

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Nobody Asked Me, But… No. 267: Hotel History: Famous Artist Edward Hopper and His Hotel Management Paintings

Posted on June 27, 2022 by Stanley Turkel

Nobody Asked Me, But… No. 267: Hotel History: Famous Artist
Edward Hopper and His Hotel Management Paintings
Stanley Turkel | June 21, 2022

Hotel History: Famous Artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and his Hotel Management paintings
by Stanley Turkel, CMHS

The American artist Edward Hopper was known for interest in hotels,
motels, tourist homes, and the wide scope of hospitality services. From
1920 through 1925 he worked as a commercial illustrator for Hotel
Management and Tavern Topics from the Great Depression through the
Cold War. He augmented his knowledge of hospitality services as a
frequent guest in several lodgings on the long-distance automobile trips he took with his wife, the artist Josephine Hopper. Beginning in the mid-
1920s and through the early 1960s, Hopper explored hospitality services subjects in paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints. Sometimes he
titled these works as “hotel” or “motel,” but just as often he did not. More
than half are composites of sites, with no small amount of invention and
artistic license.

In the early 1920s, Hopper produced illustrations and covers for Tavern
Topics, published and distributed by the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New
York, and in 1924 and 1925, he drew eighteen brilliantly illuminated
covers for the trade magazine Hotel Management. Edward and Jo lived
much of their lives in Manhattan, which, like other regions across the
country, experienced a massive hotel-building boom in the first quarter of
the twentieth century. Hotel-generated revenue fell by more than 25
percent in the Depression years of 1929 through 1935, which was hardly
a deterrent to Hopper.

Between the World Wars, Hopper produced at least two etchings and five
paintings synthesizing architectural components of various urban
hotels—some of which he knew from living in New York, while others
harked back to images suggested in the pages of Hotel Management during
the years he produced its covers. For the most part, the covers depict
elegant couples dancing, dining and boating in a hotel environment.

Looking out from the vantage point of their home at 3 Washington Square
North in New York, the Hoppers would have encountered several hybrid
rental structures, including a ten-story campanile at 53 Washington
Square South. Designed by McKim, Mead & White and built in 1893, this
was actually part of the Hotel Judson, the proceeds from which benefitted
the colonnaded Judson Memorial Church next door. Hopper captured this
view in the painting November, Washington Square, which he commenced
in 1932 and to which he added sky components in 1959. The Hoppers’
friend, artist John Sloan, lived at the Hotel Judson for eight years, until he
was evicted by New York University (which had earlier annexed the
property). The three-story, burnt orange structure at far left in the painted
version is the House of Genius boardinghouse, at 61 Washington Square
South, which, at various times from the 1910s through the 1930s, housed
artists, authors, poets, and musicians, including Theodore Dreiser, John
Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill, and Alan Seeger.

Apartment hotels are among the structures figuring in the architectural
types Hopper synthesized in selected compositions such as House at Dusk.
Popular, urban lodging houses offering short-term leases, these were essentially apartments but with the amenities of a hotel. These middle-
class hybrid spaces contained multiple units with shared bathrooms and frequently contained sitting rooms with pianos and offered a restaurant,
a doorman, and daily maid service.

The result of at least nine study drawings, Hotel Lobby is probably
Hopper’s most comprehensive treatment of the hospitality services
theme. Seated in an upholstered chair, a young woman in a blue dress
reads her book, reclining at angles that mirror those of her more mature
counterpart across the foyer. On the back wall, a view through dark drapes
in an open doorway reveals a restaurant with linen-covered tables. The
lines formed on the floor reflect period design principles treating carpet
as a means to guide crowds and determine the placement of furniture.
Even more important for crowd and climate control is the revolving
door—cropped at left in Hotel Lobby. For all Hopper’s urban architectural
imagery, revolving doors appear in just two of the studies for this work
and in only one other painting (Sunlight in a Cafeteria, 1958, in the Yale
University Art Gallery). Variations of the revolving door had existed since
at least the mid-nineteenth century with the quest to regulate ventilation
and keep temperatures constant in public settings. Allowing no air in from
the outside, a revolving door was, in the words of an early promoter,
“always closed.” This helps explain how Hotel Lobby, a painting finished in
January of 1943, and featuring a couple in winter clothing, could also
depict a coatless woman in a short-sleeve dress.

Many of the 18 known Hopper HM front covers were done in the mid-
1920s. For the most part, the covers depict one or more elegant couples enjoying an activity such as dancing, dining and boat set against a created
hotel background. Hopper used actual hotels—Ohio’s Cincinnatian Hotel
and New York’s Mohonk Mountain House—as inspiration on two of the
covers. The illustrations’ light colors and energetic activities are a distinct
departure from Hopper’s more-somber famous works, such as “Automat”
or the iconic “Nighthawks”. The Hoppers, Edward and Josephine [also a
painter], had lunch every day at The Hotel Dixie in New York.

And perhaps absorbing the hospitality mindset that it’s all about the guest
experience, the VMFA has gone one step farther, recreating the hotel room
seen in Hopper’s 1957 work “Western Hotel.”

Edward and Jo began renting summer cottages in South Truro on Cape
Cod in 1930 and would buy property and then build a home there a few
years later. By the 1940s, Cape Cod possessed a number of tourist
homes—furnished single-family dwellings offering rooms for short-term
stays, often seasonally. Deeply interested in domestic architecture,
Hopper painted several tourist homes over his long career, but he seems
in retrospect to have been particularly interested in one such residence in
Provincetown on Cape Cod. He spent several long nights parked before the
structure, making drawings, resulting in a painting that offers a view into
the front rooms of the house—apparently, the inhabitants wondered what
the artist was doing, sitting there in his Buick sketching away.

The Hoppers took long periodic road trips in search of subject matter
across New England, the West, and Mexico, among other locales. On these
jaunts, they stayed at tourist homes and, eventually, as Edward’s income
increased, in motels and motor courts. Portions of Jo’s diaries—covering
the mid-1930s to the 1960s, and recently given to the Provincetown Art
Association and Museum—reveal page after page of extended
descriptions of these lodgings and the couple’s feelings about them. One
of the more colorful and lengthier of these entries discusses their stay at
the Weseman Motor Court in El Paso from December 15 through
December 22, 1952. Hopper painted Western Motel during a fellowship at the Huntington Hartford Foundation in Pacific Palisades, California, but
the canvas also evokes Jo’s descriptions of and contemporary press
discussing lodgings in El Paso.

The Hoppers took five long trips to Mexico between 1943 and 1955, on
which they also visited several regions in the United States; they traveled
by train in 1943, but on the other jaunts they traveled by car. They
frequently sized up a locale based on the quality of their lodgings and the
view offered by their room and from the structure’s roof. Much of what we
know about Hopper’s time in Mexico comes from the couple’s
correspondence on hotel and motel letterhead and postcards. Dating from
his first trip to Mexico, Saltillo Rooftops enlists the stovepipe of his hotel
rooftop at the Guarhado House (where he and Jo stayed) in the foreground
to balance the unfolding span of the Sierra Madre mountains in the
background. In Monterrey Cathedral, he returns to his practice of using his
lodgings (in this case the Hotel Monterrey) as a framing device to
synthesize a visual inventory of hotels and other structures—the cropped
signage for the Hotel Bermuda appears at the lower left. Hotels and motels
may provide a useful metaphor for understanding much of Hopper’s work
in general. He took for granted that hotels and paintings offer temporary
experiences, serve multiple individuals, and are, ultimately, highly crafted
illusions. Hopper viewed his art—his paintings and watercolors in
particular—as sites in which to invest temporarily and upon which to
muse later with equal parts introspection and nostalgia. Sixty-nine of
these paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and magazine covers are
featured—along with thirty-five works on the theme by other artists—in
the exhibition Edward Hopper and the American Hotel at the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

It is perhaps fitting that the exhibition is organized by and makes its debut
there. The Hoppers visited Richmond on several occasions. His own art
would be featured in subsequent biennial exhibitions. Hopper returned to the museum in 1953 for a Judge the Jury exhibition, around the time the
museum purchased House at Dusk. A photograph from this visit shows
Hopper and Richmond artist Bell Worsham standing before Hopper’s
painting Early Sunday Morning. Following up on some spirited
communication, via the couple’s lodgings on this visit, the museum’s
director, Leslie Cheek Jr., assured Hopper, “While in Richmond you will be
quartered at the Jefferson Hotel, a Beaux-Arts structure I believe you will
enjoy.” There were plenty of hotels in which Cheek could have placed
Hopper, but he made sure that the artist was staying at an establishment
recognized as the “finest in the South.”

Hopper’s work for Hotel Management did indeed, influence his career. The
things he did for Hotel Management—and even some of the photographs
and advertisements and articles—provided a storehouse of images and
ideas he would return to again and again.

All of my following books can be ordered from AuthorHouse by
visiting stanleyturkel.com and clicking on the book’s title:

• Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2009)
• Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels in New York (2011)
• Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels East of the Mississippi (2013)
• Hotel Mavens: Lucius M. Boomer, George C. Boldt, Oscar of the Waldorf
(2014)
• Great American Hoteliers Volume 2: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry (2016)
• Built To Last: 100+ Year-Old Hotels West of the Mississippi (2017)
• Hotel Mavens Volume 2: Henry Morrison Flagler, Henry Bradley Plant, Carl Graham Fisher (2018)
• Great American Hotel Architects Volume I (2019)
• Hotel Mavens: Volume 3: Bob and Larry Tisch, Curt Strand, Ralph Hitz,
Cesar Ritz, Raymond Orteig (2020)
• Great American Hotel Architects Volume 2 (2020)
If You Need an Expert Witness:

Stanley Turkel has served as an expert witness in more than 42 hotel-
related cases. His extensive hotel operating experience is beneficial in cases involving:
• slip and fall accidents
• wrongful deaths
• fire and carbon monoxide injuries
• hotel security issues
• dram shop requirements
• hurricane damage and/or business interruption cases

Feel free to call him at no charge on 917-628-8549 to discuss any hotel-
related expert witness assignment.

ABOUT STANLEY TURKEL

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