The Highland Weekly News

How a Hotel in Full.

A large hotel in a city like New York or Chicago is a larger thing than most people stop to think. It is, in fact, a good sized village. Let the Herald, for a minute, take off the cover and give its readers a glance down into the bee-hive.

In the first place, there are from 500 to 800 guests—and sometimes more—tramping through those corridors, laying on those lounges, pushing pool-balls on those tables, and concocting schemes of wealth and politics in those private parlors. In the next place, there are between 300 and 400 employes—many of them visible in the hallways, in the dining-rooms, in the rotunda, and at every nook and corner: but by far the greater number are out of sight in the cellar, kitchen, laundry, pantries, and scores of other subterranean places. There is the population of your village, to start on.

But let us take a tour of the house and see what may be seen. And first, of course, we start with the office, with its marble floors, gilded columns and pictured ceilings. This is, in hotel parlance, 'the office department,' and here, behind the counter, are—the cashier, the room-clerk, the key clerk, the letter clerk, the 'front' clerk—or man who 'fronts' up to the counter with genial mien to answer questions and do the clever thing—and then the night clerk and his assistant. All these, except the two last, have their duplicates, and the two sets alternate, being on 'watch' six hours at a time, from six o'clock in the morning until eleven or twelve at night.

Then we pass up the broad staircase to the velvet-carpeted halls, parlors and 'rooms'—and all this is the housekeeper's department. The housekeeper is usually a matronly lady of dignity and broad experience. She has charge of everything, so to speak, above the office floor, including from thirty to forty chambermaids, with a head chamber maid; fifteen or twenty 'scrubbers,' with a scrub woman generalissimo, and from a dozen to fifteen paint cleaners, also with a captain—about sixty or seventy women in all. The chambermaids make the beds and get a man's boots in the wrong place; the scrub women wash the floors, and the paint cleaners keep the finger marks and coal soot off the doors, not to mention many other places vulnerable to dirt.

Then there is the head furniture man, with his corps of from twelve to eighteen assistants, whose mission in life is to take down and put up bedsteads and shove bureaus around, besides half a dozen window washers, who delight in risking their lives on the ledges of six-story windows; two or three furniture polishers, who carry around chamois-skin and oiled rags to preserve the gloss on rosewood and mahogany, and about the same number of upholsterers, whose business is to keep the covers and tassels on chairs and put castors on dissolute sofas.

But that is not all. There is a head painter, too, and a dozen or fifteen subordinate painters, who keep the pin wood from showing through where it ought not to, and in this class are usually one or two genuine artists, frescoers and the like, who do nothing but put fancy touches on the ceilings, and keep the naked man in the big blue cloud over the rotunda from falling out of the sky or becoming dustily blended with the fleece-covered lady driving a chariot upside down.

Then there is a bell-boy at every turn. He is usually colored, and forms only one of a dozen or more in his watch. Each watch has a captain, and they are all under a head bell-man, and they live to carry up your card to a guest, or escort you to your room, and bring you ice water and put a wet towel on your head—if you happen to be a guest.

But the porters must not be overlooked, and the reader may take them in as we come down stairs from the upper chambers. They are usually able-bodied white men, any one of them skilled and muscular enough to balance a shoe drummer's sample-case on his chin or walk it up to the sixth story on the point of his elbow. They handle the baggage, and the head-porter keeps a book telling just what train each guest intends to leave on and just what omnibus he ought to be piled into. These porters, too, fifteen or eighteen of them just by way of pastime—'put a shine' on about four or five hundred pairs of boots and shoes a day in a first-class hotel.

Then there are the elevator boys, and the watchmen, the whisk broom boys in the wash-room and elsewhere. They brush your clothes and check your overcoat and put a clean towel and soap where you want to find them—and it keeps them rustling, too.

But we haven't got half through yet. You've only seen the 'visible front' and none of the 'running department,' as it is called, which is where the real work is done. This is the steward's department. He has charge of the whole back of the house—the kitchen, the laundry and all that they involve, including the dining room and waiters.

In the basement are some mighty engines—as big as an ocean steamer's, possibly—which supply heat to all the house, run the working departments everywhere and keep the electric lights glowing. Here there are two or three firemen and an engineer, both day and night, and some plumbers, a locksmith, steam-fitters, gas-fitters and similar mechanics.

A first-class steward gets a salary of from $2,500 to $3,500, and under his direction are a second steward, a couple of receiving clerks, who take in all the provisions; a brace of storekeepers, who have charge of them after they are taken in; then seventy-five or a hundred waiters, with a head-waiter, of course, and usually a French cook, or chef, with an army of cooks under him. There are waiters in the dining-room, waiters in the restaurant (if the hotel happens to have one), and waiters who carry meals to sick ladies or other indisposed guests in their rooms, and all these go on and off watch at judicious intervals. The chef is a very big man in his way, and gets $2,500 to $3,000 a year, according to his ability for artistically hashing up 'things to eat.' He has twelve or fifteen assistants—meat cooks, pastry cooks, vegetable cooks, bakers and confectioners, for, according to the modern necessities for the division of labor, even cooks have their specialties, and then there are about twenty-five or thirty dish-washers, and a lot of people who handle table-cloths and napkins, crockery and silverware, and a whole raft of supernumeraries concerning whom no fellow on earth can find out what they are apt to do when the dinner-serving business is in full blast. It is as much as a man's life is worth to get in the kitchen when a meal is under way, for the whole regiment, cooks, waiters, dish washers and all go whirling around like so many peas in an enormous pod, and the air is as full of steam and smoke as pandemonium itself. Everything is clean and glistens like burnished silver, so dainty stomachs need have no fear of getting more than their rightful 'peck of dirt' out of a hotel kitchen.

Along one side of an immense room is a range about a mile long. On it are a score of tables with every conceivable edible laid out handy. Every kind of cooked meat stands under a big pewter cover, which swings aloft on a chain and pulley when a man wants to cut off a slice, and everywhere is wonderful order in the midst of wondrous confusion. All the dishes are kept warm on a series of steam-heated racks hung with curtains to keep specks off, and near by are a series of vats where the dish-washers are up to their ears in mist, sliding crockery around in soap-suds by the barrelful. The laundry is a repetition of this terrible hustle—a mass of vats and wringers, flat-irons, white-covered ironing-tables and good-natured girls, who flop off a napkin as if it were no joke at all, or turn a collar over with the dexterity of a laundry-born and bred Chinaman.

An important adjunct of every hotel is the wine-room, under the supervision of the wine steward. In the bar-room are two or three bar-tenders, a man who washes the glasses and slings drinks when he is not washing, and a cashier, all of whom have their duplicates, so that there is a change in the hands on deck about every six hours. The billiard tables are looked after by a set of boys, who hand out the balls, head the cues, brush the cloths and keep things in shape generally.

This much for hotels. A great deal more might be said about milk contracts and match contracts, meat-stacks as big as ice-houses—and all that sort of thing—from boxes of wooden tooth-picks up to tons of coal—but enough has been said to show that a hotel is worth looking into, when the top is taken off, and the reader is left to infer whether the original premise be not true—that a large hotel in a large city is a village all by itself. Chicago Herald.