The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1899-03-24
SPEAKING OF HOTELS.
A New York Sage Makes Some Point
ed Observations.
From the New York Press.


From the New York Press.
People travelling through or trans
tents. have not the slightest knowledge
of the way in or out of a hotel except by
means of the elevator. If you were to ask
100 of them, where the stairs are they
would be nonplussed. The old way of
building the stairs around the elevator
shaft is equivalent to building fire es-
capes on the inside of a chimney. A SEN
sible man, who has been smart enough TO
live fifty years and beat his fellow citi-
zens out of half a million dollars would
feel silly to run his head against a blank
wall in endeavoring TO escape from fire,
but he often does it,
Whenever a man patronizes hotel with
which he is unacquainted ii should be his
first duty to inspect the premises so that
in case OF accident he would know the lay
of the land. If he has a family on his
hands he commits a crime of omission
when he neglects to do this. venture the
assertion that people who had lived at the
Windsor for years could not have told you
where the stairways were. II is always
the elevator, the elevator UP a all hours
and down at all hours. The shaft is only
a chimney. A draught through it cannot
possibly be checked.
than flames. When the lungs are filled
with it the senses are Weakened Just as
they are by the administration of ether or
chioroform. Not one person in 900 knows
enough to lie down and crawl on the floor
instead of standing erect and breathing
smoke
The modern fire escape is a fraud. and
must have been devised by some shrewd
legislator as a strike against hotels. One
IL, 49,,
BILE, most elegant hotels in New York has
not even this poor excuse for safety in
sight on either of its three exposed fronts.
And l have never seen so much as a rope
in one of its several hundred rooms
1t is a sound principle that no gentle
man and no lady should live in hotel. Ho-
tells are simply public conveniences, and
people who can afford to have homes
should not exist in public conveniences.
Children reared in hotels are the play
things of every kind of human cattle. They
grow up fresh" sassy" ignorant of ev-
cry grace except disgrace, and utterly ir-
religious I'd rather take chances on
child reared in a prison.
Striking an average, the people who live
in hotels are fond of the gilt gloss and
glitter of life. Possibly they cannot ap-
preciate what home is. Their minds run
to seeing and hearing what the mob of rich
nary existence as short and gay as posi-
bic. A man who has lived in a hotel for
ten years never is fit to settle down. A
woman who has lived in one that long
could no more marry and become a happy,
contented mother in cottage than she
could eat moons and satellites for break
fast.
In France all houses are hotels, the
home of one family as wen as the public
convenience" of the travelling public of
the whole world Even the city hall in
Paris is a hotel-the Hotel de Vile Every
town in France has its Hotel de Vile Ac-
cording to the modern acceptation of the
word in other parts of the world a hotel
is a house for entertaining strangers or
travellers, but that definition will not do
Let us consider for a moment. A hotel
as we view it dispassionately, besides be-
ing all sorts of a public convenience. is a
barroom, a billiard room, a pool parlor
a public latrine, a common, free Heux
d'aisance, a place to play poker, place
to buy and sell goods, dance hall, a
feasting haR, a political club house, a ci-
gar emporium, a Ho:-Polloi ordinary,
Tom, Dick and Harry loaflng quarter. a
bootblack shop, a barber shop, a stock
brokers' office TO entrap the innocent, I'M
wary traveller who is called TRANSIENT
and-but why go on? l cannot tell every
thing that hotel is in a minute.