ABSTRACT
When steamship services began on the North Atlantic and the great inland waterways of Europe and North America in the late 1830s, they cut travel times dramatically and provided relatively predictable services, first only for the rich but soon also for the mass migration of Europeans to the United States. Whereas steerage passengers arriving at their destinations would take up residence, typically, in the rooming houses and tenement apartments of ethnic neighbourhoods, many of the wealthier business travellers or tourists, stopping in Boston, Philadelphia or New York following a voyage, required a hotel and wanted one that would greet them in style. According to the architectural critic and cultural historian, Russell Lynes, ‘the old traditions of inn-keeping, of crowding the guests into trundle beds, or making them sleep on floors, of courtyards filled with chattering peddlers and creaking carriages, of lobbies which were also barrooms, and room clerks who were also bartenders’ would give way by the 1830s to altogether higher expectations. 2 Such expectations were stimulated by the opening, in 1829, of the first modern palace hotel, Tremont House in Boston (fig. 4.1). Designed by Isaiah Rogers, the son of a Massachusetts family of shipbuilders, Tremont House was a four- storey, Greek Revival structure, reputed to be the largest building in America at the time, but also, more significantly, the first luxury hotel in the world and a model of comfort, elegance and ingenuity for all those that would follow.
