Download or read book American Hotel Stories written by Francisca Matteoli and published by Editions Assouline. This book was released on 2009 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Big Sur to Boston, this enticing volume follows in the footsteps of Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, Al Capone, Clint Eastwood, Esther Williams, and some of America's most famous personalities and hotel guests. Which famous star stayed at the Biltmore in Coral Gables? Where did notorious Beat writer Jack Kerouac seek refuge? Which beloved entertainer still performs in the cafe of The Carlyle in Manhattan? Which folk singer produced an album and a child in the Hotel Chelsea? The myths, the mysteries, and the affairs unravel city by city in this captivating book by travel writer Francisca Matteoli. A comprehensive appendix guides you to a select list of the nation's most unique hotels to make your own story.
Download or read book American Hotel Story written by Richard Estep and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-11 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 20, 1924, the newest hotel in downtown Los Angeles opened its doors. Catering to businessmen, bankers, theatergoers, and travelers, the Cecil started out as a home away from home for the city's high rollers. Then came the Great Depression. Times changed, and the hotel found itself in the middle of Skid Row. Awash in a sea of violent crime, drugs, and homelessness, the Cecil gained a dark reputation which remains to this day. Tales of murder, suicide, and serial killers are just one part of the hotel's checkered past. Some also claim that restless spirits haunt the rooms and hallways. Following the bizarre and tragic death of a young woman, whose body was found floating in a rooftop water tank, the Hotel Cecil once again found itself in the unwelcome limelight of public attention. Join Richard Estep of TV's "Haunted Hospitals" and "Paranormal 911" in an exploration of this iconic LA landmark's past, present, and future.
Download or read book Hotel written by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and published by . This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When George Washington embarked on his presidential tours of 1789-91, the rudimentary inns and taverns of the day suddenly seemed dismally inadequate. But within a decade, Americans had built the first hotels--large and elegant structures that boasted private bedchambers and grand public ballrooms. This book recounts the enthralling history of the hotel in America--a saga in which politicians and prostitutes, tourists and tramps, conventioneers and confidence men, celebrities and salesmen all rub elbows. Hotel explores why the hotel was invented, how its architecture developed, and the many ways it influenced the course of United States history. The volume also presents a beautiful collection of more than 120 illustrations, many in full color, of hotel life in every era. Hotel explores these topics and more: · What it was like to sleep, eat, and socialize at a hotel in the mid-1800s · How hotelkeepers dealt with the illicit activities of adulterers, thieves, and violent guests · The stories behind America’s greatest hotels, including the Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza, the Willard, the Blackstone, and the Fairmont · Why Confederate spies plotted to burn down thirteen hotels in New York City during the Civil War · How the development of steamboats and locomotives helped create a nationwide network of hotels · How hotels became architectural models for apartment buildings · The pivotal role of hotels in the civil rights movement
Download or read book Adventure Guide Hotel Stories written by Francisca Matteoli and published by Assouline Books & Gifts. This book was released on 2005 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adventure is a state of mind. An addiction to the unexpected, the unknown, freedom, and risk. It s Steve McQueen driving his speeding bullets during the shooting of Le Mans; Dian Fossey with her gorillas in Rwanda; Lawrence of Arabia fascinated by the Jordanian desert; Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda crossing New Mexico on their Harleys; and Harry Potter at Hogwarts. In this book, Francisca Matteoli follows the paths of these adventurers and brings their legendary films to life, connecting each narrative with an unusual hotel. A unique and personal guidebook, full of anecdotes, information, and souvenirs."
Download or read book American Hotel written by David Freeland and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completed in 1931, New York’s Waldorf-Astoria towers over Park Avenue as an international landmark and a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture. A symbol of elegance and luxury, the hotel has hosted countless movie stars, business tycoons, and world leaders over the past ninety years. American Hotel takes us behind the glittering image to reveal the full extent of the Waldorf’s contribution toward shaping twentieth-century life and culture. Historian David Freeland examines the Waldorf from the opening of its first location in 1893 through its rise to a place of influence on the local, national, and international stage. Along the way, he explores how the hotel’s mission to provide hospitality to a diverse range of guests was put to the test by events such as Prohibition, the anticommunist Red Scare, and civil rights struggles. Alongside famous guests like Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, and Eleanor Roosevelt, readers will meet the lesser-known men and women who made the Waldorf a leader in the hotel industry and a key setting for international events. American Hotel chronicles how institutions such as the Waldorf-Astoria played an essential role in New York’s growth as a world capital.
Download or read book Hotel Life written by Caroline Field Levander and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-04-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities. More than simply structures made of steel, concrete, and glass, hotels are social and political institutions that we invest with overlapping and contradictory meaning. These alluring places uniquely capture the realities of our world, where the lines between public and private, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred. Guiding readers through the story of hotels as places of troublesome possibility, as mazelike physical buildings, as inspirational touchstones for art and literature, and as unsettling, even disturbing, backdrops for the drama of everyday life, Levander and Guterl ensure that we will never think about this seemingly ordinary place in the same way again.
Download or read book Meet Me at the Theresa written by Sondra K. Wilson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-02-17 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaving an array of firsthand accounts into a landmark biography of the Harlem hotel, "Meet Me at the Theresa" examines the myriad ways visitors of the hotel left their mark on American social, political, and cultural history.
Download or read book Hotel Dreams written by Molly W. Berger and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-18 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2012 Sally Hacker Prize, Society for the History of Technology Hotel Dreams is a deeply researched and entertaining account of how the hotel's material world of machines and marble integrated into and shaped the society it served. Molly W. Berger offers a compelling history of the American hotel and how it captured the public's imagination as it came to represent the complex—and often contentious—relationship among luxury, economic development, and the ideals of a democratic society. Berger profiles the country's most prestigious hotels, including Boston's 1829 Tremont, San Francisco's world-famous Palace, and Chicago's enormous Stevens. The fascinating stories behind their design, construction, and marketing reveal in rich detail how these buildings became cultural symbols that shaped the urban landscape.
Download or read book Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet written by Jamie Ford and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2009-01-27 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sentimental, heartfelt….the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages...A timely debut that not only reminds readers of a shameful episode in American history, but cautions us to examine the present and take heed we don’t repeat those injustices."-- Kirkus Reviews “A tender and satisfying novel set in a time and a place lost forever, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet gives us a glimpse of the damage that is caused by war--not the sweeping damage of the battlefield, but the cold, cruel damage to the hearts and humanity of individual people. Especially relevant in today's world, this is a beautifully written book that will make you think. And, more importantly, it will make you feel." -- Garth Stein, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Racing in the Rain “Jamie Ford's first novel explores the age-old conflicts between father and son, the beauty and sadness of what happened to Japanese Americans in the Seattle area during World War II, and the depths and longing of deep-heart love. An impressive, bitter, and sweet debut.” -- Lisa See, bestselling author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept. Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago. Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart. BONUS: This edition contains a Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet discussion guide and an excerpt from Jamie Ford's Love and Other Consolation Prizes.
Download or read book Hotel written by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a history of the nineteenth-century first-class hotel, of what hotels have meant to American business, culture, and racial politics.
Download or read book The Hotel Book written by Shelley-Maree Cassidy and published by Taschen. This book was released on 2003 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who minds sleeping under a mosquito net when it's royally draped over the bed in a lush Kenyan, open-walled hut, fashioned from tree trunks and shielded from the sun by a sumptuous thatched roof? This selection of the most-splendid getaway havens nestled throughout the African continent is sure to please even the most finicky would-be voyagers. Photos.
Download or read book Front Desk Front Desk 1 Scholastic Gold written by Kelly Yang and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside Out and Back Again meets Millicent Min, Girl Genius in this timely, hopeful middle-grade novel with a contemporary Chinese twist. Winner of the Asian / Pacific American Award for Children's Literature!* "Many readers will recognize themselves or their neighbors in these pages." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewMia Tang has a lot of secrets.Number 1: She lives in a motel, not a big house. Every day, while her immigrant parents clean the rooms, ten-year-old Mia manages the front desk of the Calivista Motel and tends to its guests.Number 2: Her parents hide immigrants. And if the mean motel owner, Mr. Yao, finds out they've been letting them stay in the empty rooms for free, the Tangs will be doomed.Number 3: She wants to be a writer. But how can she when her mom thinks she should stick to math because English is not her first language?It will take all of Mia's courage, kindness, and hard work to get through this year. Will she be able to hold on to her job, help the immigrants and guests, escape Mr. Yao, and go for her dreams?Front Desk joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!
Download or read book Heads in Beds written by Jacob Tomsky and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry. “Highly amusing."—New York Times Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge. Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.
Download or read book Edward Hopper and the American Hotel written by Leo G. Mazow and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using recreated itineraries, travel along with Edward Hopper on his various road trips and encounter hotels, staff, and guests as seen through the artist's eyes The painter, draftsman, and illustrator Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is one of America's best-known and most frequently exhibited artists. Hotels, motels, and tourist homes are recurring motifs in his work, along with streets, lighthouses, and gas stations forming a visual vocabulary of transportation infrastructure. In ten essays, this fascinating volume explores Hopper's lifelong investigation of such spaces, shedding light on both his professional practice and far-reaching changes in transportation and communications, which affected not only work and leisure but also dynamics of race, class, and gender. Hopper's covers for the trade journal Hotel Management, in addition to other well-known works, invite reflection on the complicated roles of the nascent New Woman; the erasure of hotel work and workers; contemporary associations of the color white with cleanliness and purity; the watercolors Hopper made from hotel windows and rooftops in Mexico; and the broader context of transportation history. A final chapter then situates Hopper's contribution to the fascinating role that the hotel has played in the broader development of American art in the 20th century. As a unique feature, the book's backflap also holds two "TripTik"-like, removable maps that trace the journeys that Hopper and his wife, the artist Josephine "Jo" Nivison Hopper, took by car in the 1940s and 1950s; selected correspondence and quotations from Jo's own diaries join reproductions of postcards and ephemera illuminating their--and fellow Americans'--shifting travel habits. Distributed for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition Schedule: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (October 26, 2019-February 23, 2020) Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields (June 4, 2020-September 13, 2020)
Download or read book The Graybar Hotel written by Curtis Dawkins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Curtis Dawkins's first short story collection, he offers a window into prison life through the eyes of his narrators and their cellmates. Dawkins reveals the idiosyncrasies, tedium, and desperation of long-term incarceration--he describes men who struggle to keep their souls alive despite the challenges they face. In 'A Human Number, ' a man spends his days collect-calling strangers just to hear the sounds of the outside world. In '573543,' an inmate recalls his descent into addiction as his prison softball team gears up for an annual tournament against another unit. In 'Leche Quemada, ' an inmate is released and finds freedom more complex and baffling then he expected. Dawkins's stories are funny and sad, filled with unforgettable detail--the barter system based on calligraphy-ink tattoos, handmade cards, and cigarettes; a single dandelion smuggled in from the rec yard; candy made from powdered milk, water, sugar, and hot sauce. His characters are nuanced and sympathetic, despite their obvious flaws. The Graybar Hotel tells moving, human stories about men enduring impossible circumstances."--
Download or read book Hotel Juarez written by Daniel Chacón and published by Arte Publico Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of short and flash fiction, Daniel Chacón examines peoples' interactions with each other, the impact of identity and the importance of literature, art and music. In one story, a girl remembers her father, who taught her to love books and libraries. "A book can whisper at you, call at you from the shelves. Sometimes a book can find you. Seek you out and ask you to come and play," he told her. Years later, she finds herself pulling an assortment from the shelves, randomly reading passages from different books and entering into the landscapes as if each book were a wormhole. Somehow one excerpt seems to be a continuation of another, connecting in the way that birds do when they fly from a tree to the roof of a house, making "an idea, a connection, a tree-house., Misconceptions about people, the responsibility of the artist and conflicts about identity pepper these stories that take place in the U.S. and abroad. In "Mais, Je Suis Chicano," a Mexican American living in Paris identifies himself as Chicano, rather than American. "It's not my fault I was born on the U.S. side of the border," he tells a French Moroccan woman when she discovers that he really is American, a word she says "as if it could be replaced with murderer or child molester." Many of the stories are very short and contain images that flash in the reader's mind, loop back and connect to earlier ones. Other stories are longer, like rooms, into which Chacón invites the reader to enter, look around and hang out. And some are more traditional. But whether short or long, conventional or experimental, the people in these pieces confront issues of imagination and self. In "Sábado Gigante," a young boy who is "as big as a gorilla" must face his best friend's disappointment that in spite of his size he's a terrible athlete, and even more confounding, he prefers playing dolls to baseball. Whether in Paris or Ciudad Juárez, Chacón reveals his characters at their most vulnerable in these powerful and rewarding stories, anti-stories and loops.
Download or read book Hotel London written by Barbara Black and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories examines Victorian London's grand hotels as both an institution and a culture intimately connected to the urban landscape. In her new study, Barbara Black argues that London's grand hotels provided an essential space for socializing, fashioned by concerns relating to class, gender, and nationality. Rooted in Walter Benjamin's "new velocities" of the nineteenth century and Wayne Koestenbaum's hotel theory, Hotel London explores how the emergence of the grand hotel as a physical and metaphorical space helped to construct a consumer economy that underscored London's internationalism and, by extension, England's global status. Incorporating the works of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Arnold Bennett, Florence Marryat, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as contemporary depictions of the hotels in Mad Men, American Horror Story, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, Black examines how the hotel supported a corporate identity that would ultimately assist in the rise of modern capitalist structures and the middle class. In this way, Hotel London exposes the aggravations of class stratifications through the operations of status inside hotel life, giving a unique perspective on Victorian London that could only come from the stories of a hotel.
