People met in hotel lobbies - Just Well Mixed

People met in hotel lobbies

Posted on May 24, 2017

The Tea Lobby, which hosts the long-standing Afternoon Tea at The Fairmont Empress, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Photo credit: Bobak Ha’Eri. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

One of the pleasures of digging through old newspapers is the way you occasionally stumble across something that illustrates just how foreign a country the past really is.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Washington Post ran a regular column under the charmingly Victorian title "People Met in Hotel Lobbies."

(Or "Heard in Hotel Lobbies," or "Men in Hotel Lobbies," or just "In Hotel Lobbies." The title floated around a bit over the years. But you get the idea.)

The premise of the column was pretty simple. Back then, before travel became a thing that the unwashed masses did on a regular basis, coming and going through hotel lobbies was the sort of thing that marked a person out as someone of significance, as a Man of Affairs. So the Post had reporters whose job was simply to hang out in the lobbies of the city’s fashionable hotels, interviewing anybody who happened to walk by, on the theory that if you were the sort of person who would be walking through a hotel lobby your opinions were probably worth recording.

Was that theory right? Having read through a fair few of these columns, I can report to you, Dear Reader, that it was not. This was before two World Wars made Washington the capital of the free world, and the people who pass through "In Hotel Lobbies" are for the most part dreary bores pursuing the sorts of business one would pursue in the provincial capital of a provincial nation: businessmen seeking adjustments to this law or that tariff, boosters of development projects trying to drum up backing for their latest scheme, local political nabobs come to kiss their party leaders’ rings.

They’re not all dross, though. Digging through the archives, every now and then you stumble across a story that jumps out at you. Some feature confident predictions that we in the far future know will turn out to be spectacularly right (or spectacularly wrong); others say more about their subject than either the reporter or interviewee realizes; others are simply warm, relatable human interest stories. Taken together, they provide a fascinating portrait of Washington life in the long, slow sunset of the Gilded Age.

I haven’t been able to review them all — the column ran for many years, and at its height was a daily feature, so there simply hasn’t been enough time. I wanted to give you a sample, though, so I’ve read through the "In Hotel Lobbies" columns published in 1889 and 1890 and picked out a few to highlight here. (If you’d like to read more, ask your local library if they have access to ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers database, which includes all issues of the Post published between 1877 and 2000.)

November 28, 1889 : Chicago tailor A.M. Denny wants you to understand that American-made clothes are every bit as good as those made in England, thank you very G-D much.

Excerpt from "Heard in Hotel Lobbies," The Washington Post, November 28, 1889.

"After all there is nothing superior to American-made clothing," said Mr. A. M. Denny, a Chicago merchant tailor, as he sat in one corner of the Ebbitt House lobby and watched the busy throng of politicians. Mr. Denny has just returned from abroad and it was but natural for him to investigate the clothing trade and make comparisons during his absence. "We Americans not only make better and cheaper clothing, but our styles are more graceful and comfortable. It used to be thought that a certain class of Americans thought they were not properly dressed unless they had English-made garments, but they are fast getting over that idea. The English, too, are coming to our ideas of cutting and making. Quite frequently in London I would see signs which read: ‘American-made clothing here,’ or ‘The latest American fashions in clothing.’ This would indicate that our styles are becoming popular abroad. And why shouldn’t they? We employ the best workmen and offer every inducement to our designers, and in the ready-made line it would seem that we are ages ahead of our English cousins. I am not trying to make a tariff argument out of these comparisons, but rather attribute our superiority to American genius and business tact."

November 29, 1889: M.L. Parvin, "a bright mulatto" of New Orleans, argues a way forward for African-Americans that would be echoed in Booker T. Washington’s "Atlanta Compromise" six years later.

Excerpt from "Heard in Hotel Lobbies," The Washington Post, November 29, 1889.

"What do I think of the proposed national movement for the protection of the rights of the colored people?" repeated Mr. M. L. Parvin, a bright mulatto who is a prominent man among his race at New Orleans. "I hardly know what to say, as I have not given the plan that attention I should have done....