Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry

© 2009 Stanley Turkel. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/10/2022

ISBN: 978-1-4490-0753-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-0752-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-0754-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009907588

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On the cover (from left clockwise):

• A.M Sonnabend

• Bill and J.W. Marriott

• Frederick Henry Harvey

• Henry Morrison Flagler

• Henry Bradley Plant

• Carl Graham Fisher

Antique postcards from the author’s collection

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

John McEntee Bowman (1875-1931):

International Sportsman and Extraordinary Developer of Biltmore Hotels

Carl Graham Fisher (1874-1939):

Mr. Miami Beach, Mr. Montauk and Much More

Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913):

The Robber Baron Who Invented Florida

John Q. Hammons (1919-     ):

Master Hotel Developer, Builder, Owner and Manager

Frederick Henry Harvey (1835-1901):

Civilizer of the Wild West

Ernest Henderson (1897-1967):

Shrewd New England Investor and Founder of the Sheraton Corporation of America

Conrad Nicholson Hilton (1887-1979):

Flamboyant King of The Innkeepers

Howard Dearing Johnson (1896-1972):

Host of the Highway and the Orange Roof

J. Willard Marriott (1900-1985):

From Hot Shoppes to the Worldwide Marriott Hotel Company

Kanjibhai Manchhubhai Patel:

A Wonderful American Immigrant Success Story

Henry Bradley Plant (1819-1899):

Developer of Florida’s Gulf Coast

George Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897):

Inventor of Hotel Rooms on Wheels

A. M. Sonnabend (1896-1964):

Legendary Financier, Squash Champion and Hotel Pioneer

Ellsworth Milton Statler (1863-1928):

Hotel Man of the Half Century

Juan Terry Trippe (1899-1981):

Founder of Pan American World Airways and the InterContinental Hotels Company

Kemmons Wilson (1913-2003):

Founder of Holiday Inns and The World’s Innkeeper

Bibliography

DEDICATION

To four men who influenced my business career in significant ways:

1. Nathan Turkel- my immigrant/entrepreneur father who successfully operated the Manhattan-based New York Laundry for forty-five years.

2. Victor Kramer- founder of the Victor Kramer Laundry Consulting Co. who taught me how to be a consultant.

3. Preston Robert Tisch- co-founder of the Loews Hotels Corporation who gave me my first hotel job as the resident manager of the 1840-room Americana Hotel of New York.

4. Harold S. Geneen- chairman of the International Telephone & Telegraph Co. whose fact-based management methods were a revelation to me when I served as the product line manager helping to oversee the Sheraton Corporation of America.

FOREWORD

By Stephen Rushmore, President, HVS International

What better way to learn about the hotel industry than to experience it through the eyes of some of the world’s greatest hoteliers. Stanley Turkel’s book, Great American Hoteliers: Pioneers of the Hotel Industry, takes an upfront and personal view of 16 leaders who shaped the American hotel industry over the past century. Familiar names such as J. Willard Marriott, Howard Johnson and Conrad Hilton are mixed with some obscure players such as Henry Bradley Plant, Carl Graham Fisher and Henry Morrison Flagler to provide a unique insight into the intricacies of hotel development, operations and investment.

Drawing from more than 40 years of industry experience including managing some of the largest New York City hotels, Turkel captures the spirit of each of these pioneers and relates their achievements to important lessons that we can all learn from.

John Q. Hammons, still going strong developing hotels in tertiary cities at the age of 90, shows us the need to give back to the local community. While he might negotiate to buy a hotel site for only $1. his huge convention hotel developments have brought new prosperity to many decaying cities.

Juan Trippe, founder of Pan American World Airlines and InterContinental Hotels, created one of the first global hotel companies. Trippe was one of the few hoteliers who were able to create synergy through the direct ownership of hotels and airplanes. He also helped countries economically by providing state-of-the art hotel accommodations for tourist and business travelers.

Kanjibhai Manchhubhai Patel, one of the first Asian American hoteliers came to the United States in 1923 and started operating a small residential hotel in San Francisco. Over the years thousands of Patels and other immigrants followed- they became American citizens, they purchased hotels, and they realized the American dream of owning your own business.

Turkel’s book is not just a biography detailing the lives of important hoteliers but an informative text covering a number of important industry issues. For example, the Asian American hotel community through the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA), have over the years battled the large hotel franchise companies to obtain fairer franchise terms and provisions. Turkel not only vividly describes how this war has evolved, but includes all 12 points of AAHOA’s Fair Franchising Policy. Great reference material for both newcomers to the hotel industry and seasoned professionals.

Stan Turkel has written more than 200 articles on hospitality related topics. He never shies away from taking a controversial point of view and relentlessly prods industry players to do better. The titles of his articles certainly demonstrate his push for perfection; Reinventing Hotel Franchising, Accounting Guide Needs Revision, Imbalance of Equity in Contracts, and the one that gives me pain- Little Reality in a Typical Feasibility Study. Ugh! Readers of his book will see that Stan has pin-pointed many of the important issues facing the hospitality industry today and using his usual straight-forward approach- offers relevant solutions. What Stan also brings out is that many of the issues we face today are the same issues faced by the hotelier pioneers of yesteryear- how to motivate and retain staff, how to grow your company and how to fight the big guys.

Thank you to Stanley Turkel for giving the hospitality industry your unique perspective on its pioneers, its issues and most importantly its solutions.

Stephen Rushmore is President and Founder of HVS International, a global hospitality consulting organization with offices in New York, San Francisco, Miami, Boulder, Dallas, Vancouver, Toronto, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Madrid, and Sydney. He directs the worldwide operation of this firm and is responsible for future office expansion and new product development. Mr. Rushmore has provided consultation services for more than 12,000 hotels throughout the world during his 35-year career and specializes in complex issues involving hotel feasibility, valuations, and financing.

PREFACE

How lucky can you get? For the past thirty years, I have made a good living doing what I love to do. I am one of the most widely- published hotel consultants in the United States. Yet my entry into the hotel business was a random series of unexpected opportunities. My very first job in a hotel was as the Resident Manager of the Americana of New York. The general manager was Tom Troy, whose forbearance, patience and training enabled me to learn the craft of hotel keeping. Tom had trained earlier in the Statler Hotel Company. His stories about the genius of the Statler systems were stored in my memory bank until I started to write this book.

Those unexpected opportunities started after my graduation from New York University with a BS in Business Management when I went to work for my father in the New York Laundry on the east side of Manhattan. When he sold the business some three years later, I joined the Victor Kramer Company, a laundry management consulting firm. Their clients were mostly hospitals and some hotels with problems in their laundry operations and linen control systems. During the next seven years, as I served my clients (individual hospitals and state and county institutions), I schooled myself in housekeeping methods, engineering and maintenance, water and steam science, kitchen equipment and food and beverage operations. In short, I became a back-of-the-house expert. One of the clients I served was the Tisch Hotel Company, owned by Laurence and Preston R. Tisch. They owned and operated the Laurel-in-the-Pines, Lakewood, N.J.; the Grand Hotel, Highmount, N.Y.; the Traymore and Ambassador Hotels, Atlantic City, N.J.; and the Belmont Plaza and the McAlpin Hotel in New York City. When the Tisch brothers acquired Loews Theatres, they created the Loews Hotel Corporation and began an extensive new hotel construction program including the Summit Hotel, the Americana Hotel and the Regency in New York City; the Americana in San Juan, Puerto Rico; the Americana in Bal Harbour, Florida. With this expansion, I joined the Loews Corporation and helped to design, staff and operate the back-of-the-house departments of all the Loews Hotels. Then, I was selected to be the Resident Manager of the Americana Hotel (now the Sheraton New York) on 53rd Street and Seventh Avenue (1840 rooms, 125,000 square feet of meeting, banquet and exhibition space, 3 restaurants and the Royal Box Night Club). After ten months in this concentrated on-the-job training position, I was named the General Manager of the 680-room Drake Hotel on 56th Street and Park Ave. After two and a half years at the luxurious Drake Hotel, I became the General Manager of the 762 room Summit Hotel at 51st Street and Lexington Avenue. When the Summit was built in 1969, the first new hotel in New York in 30 years, it was designed by the famous Florida architect, Morris Lapidus, In a critical comment about its design, a critic said that it was too far from the beach.

After three years at the Summit Hotel, I was recruited by the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation who had recently acquired the Sheraton Corporation of America. After a year as assistant to the ITT Vice President of Consumer Services, I was promoted to Product Line Manager for Worldwide Hotel Services. In the next seven years, I traveled all over the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, the Mideast, Hawaii, the Far East on ITT/ Sheraton business negotiating new hotel developments and reviewing Sheraton Hotel budgets and performances.

During those years, the Dunfey Hotel Company in New Hampshire was Sheraton’s largest franchisee. When Dunfey was acquired by the Aetna Life and Casualty, Jack Dunfey asked me to serve as his consultant. This year-long consulting contract enabled me to establish my own hotel consulting practice.

During the past thirty years, I realized that a knowledge of the history of the hotel business is essential for anyone interested in a career in the lodging industry. As Confucius wrote, Study the past if you would divine the future. With the rapid technological changes taking place, it is more than ever important to know where we have been in order to predict where we are going.

I am an emeritus member of the Board of Advisors of the New York University Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports Management. I consider myself fortunate to have been present at the birth of the NYU hotel school back in 1997. On the many occasions that I have lectured at the school and elsewhere, I have been struck by the lack of knowledge of the students about the history of the American hotel industry. This book is my contribution to the essential effort to teach this important subject.

INTRODUCTION

Americans invented the urban luxury hotel at the beginning of the 19th century. Anthony Trollope, the famous British novelist wrote in 1862 that one of the striking features of American life in the mid-nineteenth century was that everybody travels in the States. He observed that the first sign of an incipient settlement (was) a hotel five stories high, with an office, a bar, a cloak room, three gentlemen’s parlors, two ladies’ parlors, and a ladies entrance and two hundred bedrooms. Hotel buildings defined the central business districts like the taverns and inns before them. They provided drawing rooms and parlors, sleeping accommodations, communal eating places, bars, and by the early twentieth century, private and lockable bedrooms and bathrooms.

The Eastern Hotel, Whitehall Street, New York, N.Y. in 1906 (with

awnings and fire escapes). It was built by Captain Coles in 1822 and it

was first called the Eagle Hotel. When the first successful Atlantic Cable

was laid in 1858, the hotel was renamed the Great Eastern, after the ship

that laid the cable. It survived for 98 years until Prohibition sealed its

doom in 1920.

Do students know that when Ellsworth M. Statler opened the first modern hotel in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1908, the following practices were commonplace?

• Some hotels embarrassed nonpaying male guests by cutting off their trousers at the knees and making them parade in the lobby with sandwich signs that proclaimed them as deadbeats.

• One hotel specifically forbade guests from spitting on the carpets, lying in bed with their boots on, or driving nails into the furniture.

• Even the better hotels had shared bathroom facilities. Bathtubs were usually built on a platform, and hot water cost 25 cents extra.

• About 90 percent of hotels were American plan, with cheap, unlimited food included in the room rate.

• Smoking was usually not permitted in dining rooms, bars barred women and wine and beer sold better than hard liquor.

• Rooms were heated with stoves or open fireplaces. Signs reminded guests to not blow out the gas jets.

• No hotel owner called his house full until all double beds were fully occupied, often by complete strangers. Talk about yield management.

The development of America’s 19th century hotels was the result of many things; the restlessness of the U.S. population; the increasing wealth of the commercial and industrial classes; the relative classlessness of American society; the growth of the trans continental railroad system which made long-distance travel possible (and in time luxurious); and the growth of great urban centers.

During the thirty years prior to the Civil War, Americans built hotels larger and more ostentatious than any in the rest of the world. These hotels were inextricably intertwined with American culture and customs but were accessible to average citizens. As Jefferson Williamson wrote in The American Hotel (1930), hotels were perhaps the most distinctively American of all our institutions, for they were nourished and brought to flower solely in American soil and borrowed practically nothing from abroad.

As in the past, development of hotels was stimulated by the confluence of travel, tourism and transportation. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad engendered hotel development by Henry Morrison Flagler, Fred Harvey, George Mortimer Pullman and Henry Bradley Plant. The Lincoln Highway and the Interstate Highway System triggered hotel development by Ellsworth Statler, Kemmons Wilson, Howard D. Johnson and Carl Graham Fisher. The airplane encouraged Juan Trippe, Conrad M. Hilton, J. Willard Marriott, John McEntee Bowman, Ernest Henderson, Sr., A.M. Sonnabend and John Q. Hammons.

Because the class system was not firmly rooted in America, hotels were seen as public buildings which were business and meeting-oriented and a place where all classes and people mingled together, the wealthy along with workingmen and frontiersmen.

Donald Albrecht, in his preface to New Hotels for Global Nomads writes,

Hotels are buildings that have been reinvented and reimagined for two hundred years- now more so than ever. Since the nineteenth century, hotels, whether in cities or remote oases, have evolved from simple places to sleep while on the road into elaborate destinations that combine private guestrooms, with restaurants, lounges, gyms, spas, meeting facilities and ballrooms. Architecture has become experience.

Long before hotel franchising, segmentation and branding, there were taverns with hotel rooms catering to the 19th century road warrior. But, like today there were also sharp-eyed critics of hotel amenities and services. One of the best known was a humorist named Josh Billings who wrote the following hilarious critique in the New Albany Weekly Ledger, New Albany, Indiana, March 22, 1871:

I don’t know of any business more flattersome than the tavern business. There don’t seem to be anything to do but to stand in front of the register with a pen behind the ear, and see that the guests enter the house, then tell John to show the gentlemen to 976, and then take four dollars and fifty cents next morning from the devil of a traveler.

Your room is 13 foot 5 inches, by 9 foot 7 inches, parallelogramly. The carpet is ingrained with the dust, kerosene oil, and ink spots of four generations. There is two pegs in the room to hitch coats onto; one of them broke off, and the other pulled out and missing.

There is no curtain to the window, and there don’t want to be any; you can’t see out, and who can see in? The bed is a modern slat-bottom, with two mattresses – one cotton and one husk, and both harder and about as thick as a sea biscuit. You enter the beds sideways, and can feel every slat at once as is you could the ribs of a gridiron. The bed is inhabited. You sleep some, but roll over a good deal.

Just because America is a nation of travelers, travel has not always been an exercise of comfort. In fact, the tavern/hotel described by Josh Billings above was more the likely lodging accommodation during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It was not until 1794 that the first American hotel was created when a lodging property was built on the site of the old Burns Coffee House on the Broad-way in New York City. The proprietor called it The City Hotel. The unknown builders claimed it was the first structure erected solely for hotel purposes in America. The City Hotel had seventy three rooms, large enough for visitors to call it an immense establishment. Shortly thereafter, real hotels were built in other cities: Boston’s Exchange Coffee House (1804), Philadelphia’s Mansion House (1807), Baltimore’s City Hotel (1826) and New Orleans’ St. Charles (1837). New York’s first skyscraper- for so it was regarded at the time- was the six-story Adelphi Hotel which opened in 1827.

In those days, sharing beds with strangers was common practice. It was an early manifestation of revenue maximization. Apparently, it made no difference if guests were of different sexes. This apocryphal story reveals the practice:

A man traveling in Connecticut in about 1820 was reproached by a matron of his acquaintance who accused him of living a dissipated life. The man protested that he was not so different from anyone else, that most people would act as he did when put in similar circumstances. The matron asked him to name one situation in which she would act as he did. Suppose, then, madam, the man said, that in traveling you came to an inn, where all of the beds were full except two, and in one of these was a man, and in the other a woman, which would you take? Why the woman’s to be sure, the matron answered. Well, madam, said the man, so would I.

Charles Dickens wrote in his 1842 travel journal that Boston’s Tremont House has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember or the reader would believe. The Tremont had 170 rooms, many more than the typical inn. Designed by Isaiah Rogers, a well-known architect, the Tremont had a neo-classical white granite façade and filled an entire block on Tremont Street. The Tremont contained a long list of innovative installations and features, including electro-magnetic anunciator that guests used to communicate with the front (One ring for ice-water, two for bellboy, three for porter, four for chambermaid, and not a darned one of them will come, quipped a wit of the day.); public spaces with high ceilings and marble mosaic floors; washbowls and free soap in rooms; bellhops on duty to carry guest luggage upstairs; eight bathrooms in the courtyard; and a la carte food service.

George Augustus Sala, a popular London journalist, was one of the most enthusiastic admirers of America’s hotels. He wrote in the Temple Bar Magazine in 1861: The American hotel is to an English hotel what an elephant is to a periwinkle…. An American hotel is (in the chief cities) as roomy as Buckingham Palace, and is not much inferior to a palace in its internal fittings. It has ranges of drawing rooms, suites of private rooms, vast staircases and interminable layers of bedchambers. American hotels were the wonder of the Old World. Their size, luxurious furnishings, and the excellence of their table were constant subjects of admiration in European newspapers. In fact, the belief was widespread in England that all Americans lived in hotels.

Perhaps the most super-elegant and grandest hotel of the time was the St. Nicholas which opened January 6, 1853 in New York City. The St. Nicholas was six-story 500-room, white marble treasure-house of fine, expensive things, such as window-curtains costing $700 apiece, gold embroidered draperies costing $1,000, a grand piano valued at $1,500. On all sides in the public rooms, with their twenty-two-foot ceilings, there was paneled mahogany and walnut, carved richly in scroll and figure designs. Every room, public or private, was crowded with rosewood and mahogany furniture, and the chairs and sofas were upholstered in Flemish tapestry. Turkish rugs and thick Brussels carpets were installed in hallways and rooms, and window-hangings of damask and figured silks hung at windows and between beveled French pier-glasses in ornate gilt frames. Mirrors were everywhere, in public and private rooms, in vestibules and halls, with the gaslight from huge fancy chandeliers blazing down through a riot of colored prisms on their highly polished surfaces. And everywhere, it seemed, there was gold paint. The St. Nicholas laid its gold-leaf on with lavishness that it gave rise to a popular joke of the day. It is related that an English comedian declined to put his shoes outside the door to be shined, for fear the management would gild them. The St. Nicholas lasted only thirty years until 1884, a victim of rapid mechanical and structural advancements.

Hotel pioneers went beyond electric lights, steam-powered heating, grand public spaces and private bathrooms to attract guests. They created two types of food service: the American plan in 1830, where guests paid for a days’ or weeks’ worth of meals along with the room—whether or not they ventured into the dining room. The European plan whereby the guest paid only for his room and took his meals wherever he pleased, originated in France and spread slowly in the U.S. after 1870.

The Parker House in Boston was one of the first hotels to deviate from the American plan and embrace the more flexible European plan. As such, it claims status as the oldest continuously operating hotel in America, along with the first passenger elevator in the city. Hotelier Harvey Parker was also the first to offer meals continuously throughout the day, rather than at fixed intervals, and the second floor became a popular choice for the dining clubs of the time. Twentieth century Americans resisted the European plan as an affront to democratic ideals. Today, the American plan exists only on cruise ships and certain inclusive resorts, like Club Med. The Parker House had little culinary competition in Boston, but its great contribution to the nation’s menu is its namesake roll. The ideal Parker House roll should be delicate, soft and rather sweet, typical of American rolls in the 19th century, said food critic James Beard, and consume butter by the tons.

A few other hotels are known for their kitchen’s creations. Swiss immigrant Oscar Tschirky was a busboy at New York’s Hoffman House and waited tables at Delmonico’s before joining the newly opened Waldorf-Astoria on the site of the Empire State Building in 1893 as maitre d’ hotel. As Oscar of the Waldorf, he is credited with simplifying menus in general, but specifically for writing the 907- page The Cook Book by Oscar of the Waldorf in 1896, one of the great American guides to luxurious dining.

The Brown Hotel in Louisville Kentucky, built in 1922 by lumberman J. Graham Brown, is known for its namesake dish Hot Brown. Created in the hotel’s early years by chef Fred K. Schmidt as a brand new enticement for late-night dance business, this hearty dish layers toast and sliced turkey and is slathered with Mornay sauce and topped with parmesan cheese and two strips of bacon for good taste.

The Brown Palace Hotel in Denver opened in 1892 with an eight-story atrium designed by architect Frank E. Edbrooke. More than 400 wrought iron grill work panels ring the lobby from the third through the seventh floor. Two of them are upside down, one to serve the tradition that man is imperfect; the other sneaked in by a disgruntled workman. Finding these bits of history still intrigues visitors to the 115-year old Brown Palace Hotel. Architect John Portman gave new life to the hotel atrium with his design for the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Atlanta in 1967. Incidentally, all the major hotel companies including Hilton, Sheraton and Loews turned Portman down. Only the fledging Hyatt Houses (operator of airport inns) had the foresight to imagine this new version of a historic design.

The famous novelist Sinclair Lewis who worked in a hotel and knew the business well had a traveling salesman describe it in his 1934 novel "Work of Art":

Look here, son! Somebody been ribbing you about hotel keeping not being a dignified and highfalutin’ line of business? You tell ‘em to go soak their head! Dignified! I tell you, way I figure it, some day there’s going to be even bigger and sweller hotels than the Waldorf, and then, as the hotels get bigger, the hotelmen are going to be more important.

Go to it, boy! You’ve got to learn a lot. You’ll have to learn accounting and purchasing; deal with big supply houses for maybe a thousand knives and forks, a hundred turkeys and five kegs of oysters. You’ll have to know all about china and silver and glass and linen and brocade and the best woods for flooring and furniture. A hotel manager has to be a combination of a housefrau, a chef, a barroom bouncer, a doctor for emergencies, a wet nurse, an upholsterer, a walking directory that knows right off hand, without looking it up, just where the Hardshell Baptist Church is and what time the marriage license bureau opens and what time the local starts for Hick Junction. He’s got to be a certified public accountant, a professor of languages, a quick-action laundryman, a plumber, a heating engineer, a carpenter, a swell speechmaker, an authority on the importance of every tinhorn state senator or one-night stand lecturer that blows in and expects to have the red carpet already hauled out for him. He’s got to know more about wine and cigars than the fellows that make ‘em- they can fool around and try experiments, but he’s got to sell ‘em. If you can do all this, you’ll have a good time. Go to it.

My research into the lives of great American hoteliers reveals one continuous strand: the presence of a unique entrepreneur who created a singular hotel company one hotel at a time. Most of these men did not grow up in the hospitality business but became successful through their intense on-the-job training experiences. Their tradition-breaking vision and single-minded ambition led them to heights they could not have imagined. My investigation has uncovered remarkable and startling true stories about these pioneers, some of whom are well-known and others whose accomplishments are lost in the dustbin of history.

SOURCE MATERIAL

1. Donald Albrecht, New Hotels For Global Nomads, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, 2002

2. Carolyn Bancroft, The Brown Palace in Denver, Denver 1955

3. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, Penguin Classics, New York, 1842

4. New Albany Weekly Ledger, New Albany, Indiana, March 22, 1871

5. Sinclair Lewis, Work of Art, Doubleday, New York, 1934

6. Brian McGinty, The Palace Inns: A Connoisseur’s Guide to Historic American Hotels, Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, 1978

7. The New York Times, New York, December 12, 2004.

8. James W. Spring, Boston and The Parker House, Boston, 1927

9. Arthur White, Palaces of the People: A Social History of Commercial Hospitality, Taplinger Publishing company, New York, 1970

10. Jefferson Williamson, The American Hotel: An Anecdotal History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1930

John McEntee Bowman (1875-1931):

INTERNATIONAL SPORTSMAN AND EXTRAORDINARY

DEVELOPER OF BILTMORE HOTELS

John McEntee Bowman, president of the Bowman-Biltmore Hotel Corporation had no easy boyhood. Born in 1875 in Toronto to Irish-Scottish immigrants, Bowman came to New York in 1892- he was then seventeen- with the traditional lack of funds. He carried a letter of introduction to the manager of the old Manhattan Hotel at Madison Avenue and Forty-second Street. After waiting hours for an interview, he left without seeing the manager. He subsequently mailed the letter, asking for an appointment but received no reply and no returned letter. He got his first experience in the hotel business when an employment agency sent him as a front desk clerk to a summer hotel in the Adirondacks and the following winter to a hotel in the south. He later landed a job as riding- master at the Durland Riding Academy in Manhattan, a skill he learned in Canada working for a stable of race-horses on the county fair circuit. When Durland’s passed a rule that the riding masters had to wear uniforms, Bowman rebelled, resigned and set up his own small riding academy. He had few horses and little cash but the venture was profitable enough when he left it to take charge of wines and cigars in the old Holland House on Fifth Avenue then operated by Gustave Baumann. Baumann served as his teacher and mentor and ultimately appointed him as his assistant and secretary. When Baumann opened the New York Biltmore Hotel on New Year’s Eve in 1913, he appointed Bowman as vice president and managing director. In the summer of 1914, when