THE GRAND HOTELS OF THE OLD ROCKAWAYS
by Stevie S. Stevens
From a "glass-negative" photograph of "The Columbia
Hotel" - once located at Beach 76th Street and Ocean Avenue
in Arverne, L.I., Rockaway. In the photo, the hotel is nearing completion
in the year of 1900 and the men pictured within the photo are its designers,
engineers, and construction workers. The life of this hotel would be extremely
limited - it burned to the ground in 1905, the "collateral damage"
of a fire which broke out in a near-by hotel and took the Columbia and
another hotel of equal size down with it. A typical scenario during the
early part of the century. (click on image to enlarge)
The term "hotel" conjures up images of large high-rise stately manors or buildings, usually located in major world cities such as New York, Paris, London -a wide variety of expensive lodgings - mostly four and five star accommodations. Some are modern while older inns have extensive histories and claims to fame and prestigious prior visitors. On the vacation agenda, the word "hotel" is at the extreme other end of the spectrum - from "roughing it" to luxury. The dictionary definition of the word is rather sparse and non-committal - "...a place that provides lodging and usually meals for the public, especially for transients; an inn." When considering "hotel" think of spacious rooms, clean sheets on new mattresses, up-to-date bathroom facilities, plush carpeting, room service, and various and other sundry amenities.
When reviewing former great hotels located in the Rockaways during the turn of the last century, we are not talking about what we have come to expect from hostelry living in the latter part of the century. The larger hotels that lined the shores of the peninsula back some sixty or seventy years ago were certainly not on the same par with what we today consider to be hotels and hotel living.
 |
| Arverne Hotel, later to be renamed Prince's Hotel. (click on image to enlarge) |
To be certain, there were a wide variety of large and
larger hotels erected on the Rockaway peninsula back in the year 1901.
The greatest of these were the massive Arverne Hotel (later to
be renamed Prince's Hotel) on Beach 98th Street in Arverne, the
Seaside House - located on the Bay side of Beach 103rd Street
in Seaside, Colonial Hall on Beach 64th Street - Arverne, the
stately Edgemere Club Hotel - located on the extreme south side
of Beach 35th Street in Edgemere, as well as the large Lorraine Hotel,
also located in the Edgemere section of the Rockaways. The largest hotel
in the world - to be named "Imperial" was constructed
on six blocks of beach front property (Beach 110th to 116th Streets) in
Rockaway Park back in the late 1880s but that hotel never actually fully
operated - it "opened its doors" and immediately declared itself
to be bankrupt (however one small easternly section did open for a short
while). The "Imperial" was almost immediately dismantled
and the used lumber was sold on open market for about a tenth of original
retail price. Some smaller hotel owners bought up parts of the materials
and built smaller hotels out of the reclaimed wood - exactly what happened
on Beach 116th Street with the Curley 's Atlas Hotel.
 |
| The Imperial, also known as the Rockaway Beach Hotel, the largest hotel in the world. (click on image to enlarge) |
Although these Rockaway Beach hotels - with large and imposing physical characteristics might look extensive and expensive by today's standards, in fact, they offered accommodations which were extremely reasonably priced - and rather limited. People who came out to the Rockaways for a summer vacation in 1909 had little money to spend on lodging and for only a small sum of money, a person or a family could actually rent "a room" for a month, a week, or even a few days. It is difficult for us to comprehend what people back then actually rented in each and any of those old establishments. The trade of the day rented what we would (by today's standards) consider a simple (single) room.
A rented room could be about ten by twelve feet in size, some larger, some smaller. It all depended upon what you wanted (or could afford) to spend. A room of the time was nothing more than a square box with a window - with a wooden floor, a "tin" ceiling, plaster walls (which was about the extent of fireproofing for the time), a bed or two, a chest, a mirror, and numerous notices - mostly pasted to the back of the entrance door - informing tenants what they could not do! Some of the "better" establishments provided a cold-water sink - an important selling point because men at that time were expected to "wet" shave and women needed a supply of running water to both apply and to remove make-up at the end of a day. There were no room telephones, no radios, no televisions, no fancy carpeting, and certainly NO room services of any kind!
Families who rented rooms in any establishment were expected to use communal "hall" toilet and shower rooms. For the most part, you would "get to know" the other families who were sharing your floor and were expected to make arrangements with them as to showers and baths . It was understood that "toilet" time was limited and depending upon how many toilet rooms there were on any particular floor, independent schedules were established indicating specific times when each person (family) would be expected to make use of the facilities. Smaller hotels had only one toilet room on each floor; larger places had two or more such areas on each level. For the time, this was not considered a discomfort or an inconvenience; it was expected and people had learned long before how to get along with each other and to share and apportion time wisely.