The first grand hotels

In the office of the Tremont House in Boston, a row of boxes held a bell for every guest room. When a guest rang, a small label shook to show the room number. William Havard Eliot, one of the owners, describes the device in The Rooms of the Tremont House (1830). He also describes a reading room with American and foreign newspapers, free for guests, while other people paid a small yearly fee.

The Tremont House opened on October 16, 1829, at the corner of Tremont and Beacon Streets. Its architect was Isaiah Rogers, and it had about 170 rooms. As JSTOR Daily reports his work, the historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz traces a new kind of public house to the 1790s. In his account the Union Public Hotel in Washington was begun in 1793 and paid for with a lottery, work began on the City Hotel in New York in 1794, and Boston's Exchange Coffee House rose over 100 feet before it burned in 1818. The Union Public Hotel (also called Blodgett's Hotel) never served as a hotel. Congress bought the unfinished building in 1810 for federal offices, and the Patent Office moved in. Wealthy people paid for the new hotels, and, Williamson says, the City Hotel was built by a stock company.

Which hotel was "first" depends on who is counting, and how. Sandoval-Strausz, as JSTOR Daily reports, calls the Union Public Hotel the first of the new kind. Jefferson Williamson, in a popular history of 1930, said the City Hotel was the first building in America put up to be a hotel. He also called the Tremont the first clear example of the modern first-class hotel. The editors of the Adams Papers, citing the architectural historian Talbot Hamlin, were more careful: the Tremont was "perhaps the first hotel in America of the modern type."

Williamson lists what set the Tremont apart. Its front office had clerks and was not chiefly a bar. It had no sign outside and no stables. Most guests had single or double rooms instead of sharing beds with strangers. Running water, though, seems to have reached only the ground floor and basement at first. Rogers went on to design the Astor House in New York, and Williamson says architects used Eliot's book as a guide for decades. The grand hotel was a public building as much as a lodging, a place for dinners, meetings, and news.