The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-08-15
SUMNER BOARDING.
IMPoSITIONS HERE THAT EU-
 RoPEANS WOULDN'T STAND.

Every Place of Holiday Resort Abroad
 Has Its Good Hotel, and You Pay
 Only for What You Get -The Ameri-
 can Too Ofted at the Landlords Mer-
 cy.
 He might have posed as a model for Uncle Sam, so typically American was he to the sight. and he was just as American down to the core. Like other good Americans. however, he enjoyed European life, had spent as much time as he could abroad and made allowance for the best and the worst of living fin both places.
 T am compelled to admit, patriotic as I am." he said the other day, ''that Europeans have far better facilities for getting through the summer than we. That is due chiefly to the kind of hotels they have there. In Germany, France and Switzerland any place that makes the slightest pretence to entertaining guests during the summer is provided with an adequate hotel In some of the most popular resorts of the United States there are practically no hotels.
 T will tell you a story about place I have just left. It was a seashore re- sort on Long Island that has for the past ten years grown more and more popular, There is kind of sublimated boarding house there with waitresses and little or no attention, and you pay about twenty-one dollars week for the poorest rooms.
 For that price in any European ho- tel living there permanetly or en pen sion, as it is called, could get about the best to be had. As it was, I found the hotel barely tolerable for the sake of the natural beauties of the place. I stayed on there, not because of the ho- tel, but in spite of it.
 There is another place in that vil- lage-the swell place. It is an old-fash- toned, low-ceilinged, stuffy. country house, to which wing designed with the same architectural ideals in mind has been tdded. There is one parlor and a narrow piazza. Yet for q room in that place the rate is five dollars 8 day. If you stay there for three months the price remains the same. Unless you cansent to take rooms for at least two months you cannot get into the house at all,
 There was a time when the maxl- mum price for everything in Nesy York hotel was five dollars 3 day. That was in the old days before the Euro- pean hotel had even been heard Of. Everything was included. and the price was considered pretty high at that.
 Think of such a figure for board in Long Island boarding house with only the advantage of very good meals. Of course, such a state of affairs is to be explained only through the inordinate desire of people to crowd into this little. place for two months of the year.
 In Europe there would be a good ho- tel in that town, with a casino and me- tropolitan comforts in the matter of living. Five dollars a day in a board ing house would not hold out long in any European place of the kind.
 To this place came man and his wife. who had agreed, as everybody must, to take their two rooms for two months at the rate of seventy dollars q week. They yaWere ignorant of the situa- ton of=tile house. and they found the room near the kitchen and the windows with no exposure that gave them a breeze. They decided to leave, and be- gan to barley with the landlord. They wanted to copmromise on two weeks board
 5'sD Do you suppose the proprietor let him off with any such compromise? Not a bit of it. The defaulting guest paid for the entire two months because the proprietor said he had contracted to do that and that the rooms would be useless to him, as he could never rent them so late in the season. Luckily this guest was rich enough to pay and leave at the end of the first week.
 tHe went one Monday morning. That same afternoon the rooms were taken by new tenants, who had rented them for the whole summer, to the 
 exorbitant pay at that--for. them.
 T went for the month of July to l1o- tel on the Sound, and, naturally, want ed bathing house. The proprietor of the hotel who also owned the bathing houses, rented them only by the season. That cost twenty dollars. f z But you know that guests are com- ing here for shorter periods I said. How in the world do you expect them to get bathing houses?' 2 He didn't know anything about that. ! All he seemed to be sure about was that he had to rent the houses for the sea- son, or he would find himself with them ] on his hands. Exactly the reverse was true. He had so few houses that there was constant demand for them. Seve- raj persons who had rented houses for the summer because they had to left while I was still there. Their houses were immediately taken by other guests, and in this way the proprietor | was able to get double rent.
 "A friend of mine who went up to the | Maine coast for only a week had to | take his bathing house for month at | 3 cost of eight dollars He went in the l water once, and the rest of the week it l rained. So the one bath cost him eight | dollars mer retreat who wrote that he would | stay for a month if he liked the place. 4 He did not like it, left after two days |