The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-09-14

l The proprietor of this town would as-
 sume all the housekeeping cares of his fifteen hundred tenants, and of many of his fifteen hundred employees. He
 would provide amusements and act as the court of last resort. It would
 seem as if the man who was rash
 enough to attempt the management of
 such a town, stalking his fortune on the 1 issue, must necessarily fail; but as a | fair illustration 1t is not overdrawn. l Its parallel is found in compact form, l with no feature missing and many ada | ed, in the modern big hotel, that has reached the highest development in | New York.
 Neither the bigness nor the complete
 ness of big hotel is appreciated by the
 patron who finds his interest satisfied
 with the accommodations which it fur
 nishes. He knows in a general way that 1t may be a dozen stories high and several cellars deep, and that the thou
 sand or more guests are attended by
 servants on every hand, and when he
 pays his bill he believes that the
 charges are exorbitant. One of these
 hotels, which differs from the others
 chiefly in degree, represents an invest
 ment of fifteen million dollars The
 fourteen hundred bedrooms and seven
 hundred and fifty bathrooms in it are
 so constructed by a series of inner
 courts that each opens to the outer
 air. It has several concert halls and
 theaters, three great bathrooms, and, in
 addition to its public dining-room,
 la l,o s,J,
 stance, ten thousand people are served
 daily, it has series of private dining
 rooms which are arranged for from ten
 to one thousand persons. In the
 largest ballroom in this hotel was giv- en one night last winter the charity
 ball, attended by thirty-tive hundred people, to whom supper was served; and on the same evening in other parts of the hotef were in progress two con- certs, a dinner of an association of three hundred men, and a dozen small CT dinner parties in private dining rooms, each isolated so completely that no one of the fifteen hundred regular guests need know of 1t.
 Statistics are not very entert aiming, but, there are some stories of hotels that they alone can tell and that of the supplies is one of them. For in- stance, during the year 1900 one of these big hotels spent for meats, $200,- 900; for poultry, s113000; for vegeta- bles, sSO,00O; for fruit, $42O0O; for eggs,' $12,000; for butter 57000, and for the flowers used in decorations-and there are flowers on the tables every day $50 GOO. The initial investment in sil- verware was $250,000, and with the loss es that, charitably, are credited to the craze. and the general wear and tear on table service, about forty thousand dollars a year is spent in keeping this supply up to the hotels standard. One New York hotel that suffered severely from the souvenir spoon and salt cellar mania adopted, several years ago, the plan of notifying | guests that each waiter was responsi- | ble individually for all articles on his table, and would have to make good any loss. This reduced the taking of | spoons to a robbery df1 the waiter in- stead of the hotel, andieven the souve- mir hunter has some conscience about | such a theft In the bibbest of New York hotels fifty thousand dollars year Is spent In replenishlng the linen, ind looms in Belfast are busy the year 'ound for 1t. The expenses of the eth- 1T hotels for repairs rproportionately IS large, for in the fierce business ri- ialry of the times none of them can lfford to get shabby George Barry Mallon In Ainslee's