AUGUST 2006 » book review

Age Of Luxury

Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze and Weaver
Edited by Marianne Lamonaca and Jonathan Mogul
Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY; 2005
256 pp.; hardcover; 100 color and 100 b&w images
ISBN 1-56898-555-X

Reviewed by Hadiya Strasberg

If you missed the exhibit "In Pursuit of Pleasure: Schultze and Weaver and the American Hotel," which ran November 2005 through May 2006 at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, editors Marianne Lamonaca and Jonathan Mogul have given you another opportunity to view the firm's work. Published in conjunction with the show, Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze and Weaver offers more than a glimpse of the architects' work without having to travel back in time.

Four authors contributed to this volume. The first, Mogul, also co-editor, is a fellowship coordinator and research associate at FIU. His article "Escape and Continuity: The Florida and New York Hotels of Schultze & Weaver" delves into the topic with much profundity.

After an introduction to the players – Leonard Schultze was a student of the Beaux Arts tradition and an architect for the prestigious firm Warren & Wetmore, and S. Fullerton Weaver a real estate developer and engineer as well as a wealthy man of high society – Mogul discusses Schultze & Weaver's first designs. From the founding of the firm in 1921, both men were "insiders," with considerable experience in the architecture field and plenty of important contacts. Their early projects came from these associations. Mogul details the inception of the projects, with backgrounds of the cities, the land and the hotel developers' participation, and then discusses the firm's involvement. The development boom of Miami and other parts of southern Florida brought Schultze & Weaver many commissions and propelled them into their roles as specialists of hotel building. The timing was right: it was an age of luxury, and Schultze & Weaver catered to that. The firm's resort hotels offered "architecture of luxury, one that created environments designed to produce a sense of pleasure, privilege, and prestige."

Of the architectural designs and styles, Mogul writes "In both their overall form and their details, the hotels were meant to evoke distant places and times. The firm's Miami hotels, in particular, monumentalized the Mediterranean revival architecture that became one of the region's hallmarks during the boom years." While the city had no history of Spanish settlement, a false identity was created by Miami's early developers and architects to attract tourists. The style was meant to look Spanish, but was actually a composite of architectural elements from many different regions of the world.

When Florida's building boom came to an abrupt halt in 1926, Schultze & Weaver turned its attention to New York. The Sherry-Netherland, the Pierre and the Waldorf-Astoria, all elegant towers with lavish rooms, were designed and built between 1927 and 1931. The Lexington, built in 1929, differed in its clientele, with 801 rooms available for $4 to $7 per night.

Of the Sherry-Netherland and the Pierre, Mogul writes that they had "direct links to the past glory of Fifth Avenue." Many wealthy New Yorkers of the time chose to live in these apartment hotels, which "offered residents the personal services of a full staff of employees and the use of extensive public spaces for dinning and socializing." They were "to varying degrees, mansions stretched into skyscrapers."

The Waldorf-Astoria was a great architectural achievement, writes Mogul, for just the opposite reason; both the exterior and the interior make "no dramatic gesture to the luxurious residences of the past. [...] It was easily the most prestigious, most publicized, most expensive, and largest project that Schultze & Weaver had undertaken to date, and it remains their most famous building." He attributes this to the building's quality, size, height and the variety of the dozens of public spaces within the hotel.

He only briefly mentions the hotels that the firm had designed in California, Georgia and Ohio by the mid-1920s, but his point about Schultze & Weaver's luxurious architecture is made well enough without listing each and every one of the firm's designs.

Associate professor of history at the University of Miami, Robin F. Bachin touches on a similar topic in "From the City to the Seaside: Luxury Hotels in New York, Atlantic City, and Miami Beach." She discusses the rise of these hotels, which began with the success of the Tremont House in Boston, MA, in 1829, and then writes about the emergence of Atlantic City and Miami Beach and the hotels that graced their beaches. The New Jersey shore began attracting visitors in the 1790s and the first resort hotel, the Mansion, was built in 1832. A number of other hotels followed in its footsteps, first modest Queen Anne and Stick-style buildings and then taller and more extravagant reinforced-concrete constructions. Atlantic City grew in concert with the development of better and cheaper modes of transportation and the introduction and fast commercialization of boardwalks and amusement parks.

Florida as an elite vacation destination was not developed until an interstate railroad was created in 1885. St. Augustine, FL, saw the first of the resort hotels: the four-story Spanish Renaissance Revival Ponce de Leon opened in 1888. Developer Henry M. Flager then completed five more hotels in Florida, including the Italian Renaissance-inspired Breakers in Palm Beach, which was designed by Schultze & Weaver in 1925. The firm also designed a few hotels in Spanish and Mediterranean Revival styles: the Miami Biltmore in 1924, the Nautilus Hotel in Miami Beach in 1923 and the Roney Plaza Hotel in 1925, also in Miami Beach.

We can forgive Bachin's failure to mention Schultze & Weaver until her discussion of the Floridian hotels, because she delves into the material with such enthusiasm, exploring every aspect of the resort towns. With quotes from newspaper articles and resort brochures, she presents a clear history of the resort towns and hotels and details the architecture and the amenities. The importance of the railroad is conveyed and the rampant racism against Jews and blacks is illuminated. Bachin tells it from every angle.

With "The Skyscraper and the City," the book focuses solely on New York. Keith D. Revell, associate professor of public administration at FIU, writes of Schultze & Weaver's contribution to the residential boom in apartment housing: the apartment hotel. "Squeezed by rising land costs and mounting [domestic] labor difficulties, the rich turned to architects like Schultze & Weaver for a redefinition of urban living," Revell writes. The residential hotels "freed their tenants of the responsibilities of maintaining an elaborate household while retaining the very highest levels of personal service expected by the leisure class." He describes these services and the entertainment rooms of some of the hotels.

Revell next writes of the influences and restrictions that the New York zoning regulations had on the hotel designs. Height and setback requirements were determined according to which of the five New York City districts the lot was located in and "had a great deal to do with the diversity demonstrated by Schultze & Weaver's New York hotels," writes Revell. The Hotel Pierre could not have a street wall taller than 150 ft., which Schultze & Weaver resolved by giving the building two principal setbacks; the Sherry-Netherland could not have a street wall taller than 200 ft., so the firm created two setbacks and terraces. The Park Lane, on the other hand, was not strictly influenced by zoning ordinance, but more by the economics of the project and the market that the hotel served.

By the time you get to the fourth essay, Kenneth J. Lipartito's "The Hotel Machine," the information seems redundant: the definition of luxury at the time, the grandeur of the public rooms. But Lipartito, a history professor at FIU, chooses to focus on the technology of the urban hotel and goes into much explanation of the electric lights, cash registers and switchboards for room phones, as well as the methods and issues concerning hotel management and operation.

A successful hotel started with "a simple and intelligent style in which to clothe modern construction" and depended on architects to design efficient spaces sympathetic to the behind-the-scenes operations. They laid out plans that made it easier to clean and repair equipment and that "showed an appreciation for [the] circulation" of workers and guests. New technology and systematic worker training combined to create a professional, smooth-operating and luxurious atmosphere.

But efficiency needed to be paired with personal service, and the large number hotel staff reflected that. "The hotel became a place between modernity and tradition, between the machinelike efficiency of mass production and the familial, republican space of the old civic hotel," writes Lipartito.

A little more than half of Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age is given over to studies of 14 of Schultze & Weaver's hotels. From the Los Angeles Biltmore to the Waldorf-Astoria, the hotels included in this section are ordered chronologically by completion date – from 1923 to 1931. They provide a fine geographic representation of the firm's work, ranging from Los Angeles to New York and Florida, as well as to Cuba. One to two pages of background text introduce the buildings' architecture and amenities, often followed by as many as 14 pages of mostly black-and-white photographs, watercolors, postcards, drawings and site plans. The hotels are portrayed in their heyday in this section, in all of their newness and opulence. A number of the photographs and illustrations were allotted full pages, and they capture the details, the texture, the ambiance of the architectural spaces.

For the first time, readers get a glimpse of what became of the hotels after the Great Depression. Many of these buildings are still operated as hotels, though ownership has usually changed hands. Two of the hotels, New York's Park Lane and the Roney Plaza in Miami Beach, were demolished in the 1965 and 1968 respectively. The Atlanta Biltmore Hotel is now an office building.

A few reference tools allow for easy exploration. The content's page, other than indicating the four main essays, lists each of the hotels that are individually profiled and their locations. The hotel studies' section is printed on tan pages – as opposed to the white pages reserved for the essays – and the name of the hotel appears at the bottom of the pages for easy orientation. Another helpful tool, a two-page index, brings up the rear of the book.

The only discord might be the inclusion of some postage-size photographs and indecipherable floor plans. But in a sea of more than 200 historic photographs, one wonders if we are missing much. All of the images are clearly labeled and informative.

Though the essays in Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age do not combine to provide a complete biography of Schultze & Weaver or detail every one of the firm's hotels built during the 1920s, there is much substance. The writing throughout the book is consistently strong and numerous portraits of the era are created. TB

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