Life, 1920-08-12 · page 3 of 44
Life — August 12, 1920 — page 3: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is primarily a **hotel advertisement**, not satire or political commentary. The page promotes the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City (opposite Pennsylvania Terminal) through what appears to be a manager's letter to guests. The small illustration on the right shows a **stylized bellhop or hotel staff member** in formal attire—a conventional figure used in early 20th-century hospitality advertising to represent service and professionalism. The text emphasizes the hotel's size (2,200 rooms) and service record (262,017 meals served monthly), attempting to convey reliability and modern efficiency. The manager advises guests on complaint procedures, recommending they escalate issues to supervisory staff rather than lower-level employees. This represents typical **1920s-era corporate hospitality marketing** emphasizing scale, organization, and customer satisfaction.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
* LTE E + HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA Opposite Pennsylvania Terminal New York The Public Ought to be Told There are lots of things about hotel life that I’ve al- ways thought the public ought to be told. Here, for instance, is a little hint which you may, sometime, be glad you saw and remembered: If something unsatisfactory happens, back along the line of human connections through which service has to flow, the way to get it right is to place your complaint high enough. Don’t complain to a waiter or bus-boy, but to a headwaiter, not to a bell-boy or page or porter, when you should put it to the assistant-manager. In the Pennsylvania and the Statler Hotels you’re promised satisfaction. The policies of the business, and the manager's intentions, are to give you full measure of what you're promised. It’s a responsibility; and, naturally, the higher you go with your complaint, the more of that responsibility will you find working for you. Why? Well, waiters and bell-boys change jobs oftener than executives, and are less interested in their jobs. Our “labor turnover” is pretty low, very low for a big hotel; and it is lowest among those employees who can understand and practice our policies—we’re always weeding out the other kind. When you make your complaint to a department head, or to someone more responsible than the one who isn’t giving you the required standard of service, you'll get action. It’s a big part of my job to see that you do. Speaking of the Pennsylvania, it may interest you mildly to know that in one month of thirty days, we served 262,017 meals—an average of 8,733 a day; and that the average number of registered guests was 2,874. That will help you to see that we have too much at stake to be indifferent about what kind of service you get—because we want to keep up this habit of breaking records. Hotel Pennsylvania, with its 2200 rooms, 2200 baths, is the largest hotel in the world—built and oper- ated for discriminating travelers who want the best there is. Associated with i. are the four Hotels Statler in Buftalo, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis; and each of these five hotels makes reservations forall theothers. All have private baths, circulating icewater and other unusual conveniences in every room. An entire block of ground in Buffalo has just been bought, for a new Hotel Statler. comicbooks.com