Life — September 9, 1920 — page 33: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“LIFE: HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA Opposite Ponnsylvania Germinal New York. “and a Good Disposition” The thing that keeps the hotel man watching out for his p’s and q’s is human nature. Equipment—however elaborate or well thought out—and machinery and luxurious furnishings and ingenious comfort-devices areall appreciated by travelers; but they’re all forgotten when some human part of the machinery—some employee, and usually some way-down subordinate— makes the wrong sort of human contact with one of our guests. That, of course, is the big reason why two hotels may be practically alike in size and equipment, and yet as different in character and “disposition”, if the word is permissible, as two people of the same weight and height can be. Hotels are a foe like people in “dis- position”, when you come to think of it, We think a great deal of the per- fection of our equipment, Take the Pennsylvania’s telephone system, for instance—with its 3340 phones, 200 telautographs, a staff of a hundred and ten people, and the largest private-ex- change switchboard you'll find any- where. Every part of the telephone service which we can control within the hotel is set up as perfectly as the best brains of the telephone business could make it; and the money it cost is shock- ing to think of. Yet, if the voice that comes to the guest over his wire isn’t tuned just right, or if the brain behind thevoice is slow or stupid or indifferent, the whole elaborate equipment is, for that transaction, inferior or “rotten.” That’s the human-nature side of it. But this is what I’m getting at: you can depend upon it that when we put that sort of almost-perfect_ machinery into our hotels, we aren’t going to be lax about the kind of human beings we turn it over to. You can be sure that in any Statler-operated hotel the man- agement isdoing its best all the time to see that the human element is kept as carefully up to par as the equipment. We want every guest to be “handled” like the intelligent, reasoning, fair- minded being he is (and practically all our guests are all those things); and if you, patronizing any of our hotels, ever fail to get the sort of treatment we want you to have, the manager of that hotel wants to know it—and he'll do something about it, too, By the way, I’ve often asked busi- ness men (I especially enjoy asking salesmen) how they'd like it if they had to do ninety percent of their busi- ness with men who have just finished anight’s ride in a Pullman, or who are hungry, or both at once. That's how the hotel man gets to know something about human nature, Hotel Pennsylvania, with its 2200 fooms, 2200 baths, is the largest hotel in the world—built and oper. ated for discriminating travelers who want the best there is. Associated with it are the four Hotels Statler in Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis; and each of these five hotels makes reservations for ail the others. A\ll have private baths, circulating icewater and other unusual conveniences in every room. An entire block of ground in Buffalo has just been purchased, for a new Hotel Statler. comicbooks.com