Hotels: The Great Old Dames of the American South

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

There is a style to southern hospitality, a southern comfort, a sense that dignity, decorum and charm have a place in the reception of any guest; a perception that tradition and conscience entitle a traveler to be welcomed with warmth and interest; a pride that gracious performance by staff comes from knowing and feeling that service doesn't mean servitude. To check in to three grand old southern belles is truly to appreciate the timelessness of cordiality, and how unchanged over the years are the qualities that make a hotel great. Yet those qualities are understated and unobtrusive, deliberately so, less guests be overwhelmed by legends from the past.

The beginnings of some of the hotels go back centuries, although often the actual buildings are younger, being either extensions of the original structures, or replacements for additions either pulled down by time or destroyed by fire. Though fire is always a hazard and concern to the hotel industry, many of the great old hotels in America were built by architects ahead of their time and of relatively fireproof materials. Even so, the sprinkler systems are impressive -- as one hotel director jested, "If you hear a fire alarm in my hotel, grab a snorkel or the sprinklers will drown you!"

The fire bells rang at The Homestead, in Hot Springs, Virginia once in 1942. The signal board lit up. Staff ran fast to the room indicated. Flinging open the door to the bathroom they found a soaking-wet Japanese diplomat in his shorts bending over the remnants of a fire in the tub. The Texan Rangers and FBI agents who spilled into the room a moment later found charred and wet politically-sensitive documents scattered in the bath. One of the Japanese diplomatic delegation interned at The Homestead after Pearl Harbor had decided to get' rid of embarrassing materials and had forgotten that the hotel had a prompt and patriotic sprinkler, a machine programmed to respond.

The Homestead has other machines programmed to respond. Both the telephone messages that awaken the sleepyheads who had requested a wake-up call and the verification checks that confirm the persons who sign dining-room bills truthfully are guests have been supervised by the hotel’s computer for decades. All this in a hotel whose predecessor on that spot really can claim that George Washington slept there. All this in a county that didn't at that time of our visit have a single traffic-light.

There are other surprises at The Homestead. Its name, for example. Here's a vast brick building, a palace, a what Elizabeth Taylor once called "the Versailles of America," sprawling over 16,000 sylvan acres in the western mountains of Virginia. How could it be a homestead for any single family? Yet it is, representing, the ancestral home of three generations of Ingalis. Here's a hotel that made its name with hot springs -- at a temperature of 106.8° F -- establishing a reputation as the first southern ski resort (spending $1 million to that end in 1959 at a time when a dollar was a dollar). And here's a hotel that hopes its male guests will wear a coat for breakfast and a tie for dinner, that offers carriage rides, that serves afternoon tea in the Great Hall to violins playing, and succeeding at a time when man has walked on the moon. Yet here's a hotel in a remote mountainous county that has virtually only three hardtop roads, but an adjacent paved airstrip with an instrument approach.

And so guests come by air and road looking for "a great big something in the middle of nowhere," to be greeted on arrival by fellow travelers who say, "It's hard to find this place but once you get here, you won't want to leave." They see their bags unloaded, perhaps by the group of bellmen whose service to The Homestead totals more than one hundred years. They walk past a bronze plaque commemorating the International Food Conference held here in 1943. In a way, this was the first unofficial meeting of the United Nations. The staff, however, is more proud of the realization it itself is a veritable United Nations. The employees come from every part of the world: the executive chef from Switzerland, the catering manager from Germany, grill headwaiter from Italy and the waiters from Jamaica and the Philippines.

Perhaps employees so far from home themselves particularly enjoy The Homestead at Christmas, a time when guests staying more than three days over the holidays find a decorated Christmas tree placed gratis in their rooms. The rooms are marvelous -- big, elegant yet comfortable accommodations, some with working fireplaces and all with bathrooms gleaming with the original polished fixtures.

There is plenty to do in the indoor and outdoor swimming pools, stables, bowling alleys, three 18-hole golf courses, six tennis courts, movie theater and health spa. The hotel even has a fishing professional if you'd rather cast a fly than dip your body in the waters.

The Greenbrier's initial reputation also was made as a health spa. Whereas The Homestead's location was established in Virginia by 1750 and an inn constructed by 1766, the spa of the present Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia was apparently first visited later, in 1778. And since the replacements for each hotel were started at The Homestead in 1902 and at The Greenbrier in 1910, the award of antiquity tends to be accorded The Homestead. 

Comparisons are inevitable. The resorts are only one hour apart by road. They cater for similar guests and often the same persons. They offer kindred services: charming traditions, comfortable even exquisite lodgings, excellent food, a pot pouri of activities, and a competent and caring staff. Yet each is different with its own style and its own pace. The Homestead to some might have the edge on charm and its Great Hall with roaring fireplaces, soaring ceilings, hushed atmosphere and thick comfortable carpets surely has no equal. Yet The Greenbrier scores on its vitality, its variety of public rooms, and its outrageous interior decoration, which, startling at first, grows on the newcomer with its Dorothy Draper message: You might not choose this wild decor in your home but here it's all romance and rhododendron.

"And 'Lost World'," said our guide, leading a small group past huge potted fig trees which are rotated with the greenhouse stock every two weeks, under masses of hanging baskets and cut flowers. Indeed 6,000 tulips are planted before the entrance to welcome spring, and 1,200 poinsettias decorate the hotel at Christmas.

You can compare The Greenbrier to The Homestead but really cannot prefer one to the other any more than a mother can love one child more than another. The Homestead is Ashley Wilkes; The Greenbrier is Rhett Butler. The Greenbrier would appear to lead in one respect. It has been host to 22 men who were or became president of the United States.

Yet hotels have learned not to rely on tradition. Times change and great resorts have to do the same. The Greenbrier has altered imperceptibly. Its gentle changes have been done, said James Searle, Jr., its one-time director of sales and marketing, "the way you handle a bottle of fine wine in your cellar; you don't shake it up, you just turn it a little of the time."

To accommodate the trends in eating habits of Americans, the hotel offers less beef, more veal, more fish and lighter sauces. It even presents the food "to create more white space" and not to overload the plate, the table and the stomach. It has changed dining-room hours and opened the golf club for dinner to those who wish to eat dressed more casually. It had expanded its treatment of music at our visit: there were still violins playing at afternoon tea and dinner, but the cocktail-hours band in the Old White Club was more brassy and the recorded music in the Tavern Lounge

and the dinner music in the Golf Club peppier still. The golf courses have been altered too. The three 18-hole'courses were non-demanding and not suitable for some of the present day golfing enthusiasts. Jack Nicklaus redesigned the Greenbrier Course for the 1979 International Ryder Cup matches. Nevertheless The Greenbrier continues unchanged in service, aware as all great hotels are, that staff not structures give hotels their reputation.

And its service does live up to its motto: Life as it should be. Each year, an elderly couple came from New York for a two-week visit. They walked daily down to the village, but with their advancing years found the uphill walk almost more than they could handle. The hotel could run them downtown and back in a limousine, but they loved walking. Thus, each year, quietly without fuss, the hotel placed a two-seater bench outside the gate at the point where the couple was most tired, and when the guests departed, just as unobtrusively, they removed the bench and stored it for next year.

If architect Addison Mizner had been able to complete his dreams for the Cloister Inn at Boca Raton, Florida in 1926, guests would not have been walking downtown but sailing along the "Grand Canal of Venice" in the middle of El Camino Real -- a king's highway, twenty traffic lanes wide. Mizner, possibly the most colorful character in Florida's history, had made his reputation planning elegant homes for the pampered elite of Palm Beach. His ideas were extraordinary, his designs brilliant, his mansions magnificent. Now wealthy, he was reported to have developed supercilious airs to the society matrons who had made him rich. His attitude, however, stemmed more from his madcap sense of humor than from true arrogance. After all, this was the man who once excused his walking out on a concert by Rachmaninoff by explaining: "I thought he was the piano tuner," and once greeted King Alfonso of Spain with: "Why you old son of a bitch! How the hell are you?"

Similarly disrespectful to the dowagers of Palm Beach, he became their darling, and was pursued by them for architectural drawings even when he was lying on the beach. One day, disturbed by a client who scolded him for sunbathing when he could have been designing her house, he drew a plan with a stick in the wet sand and said "Dearie, here's your home." She summoned a draftsman to copy the sketch. The house was built.

Although this eccentric side of Mizner is well known -- and, true, he did once design a Palm Beach mansion and forgot the stairway -- it must not minimize the genuine flair and creative style he demonstrated in building some of the most beautiful homes in America. The wilderness south of Palm Beach challenged and attracted him. Here, where the inlet was guarded by pointed rocks which the early Spanish explorers had called boca de ratones  (teeth of rats); here, where the Gulf stream came closest to the coast of Florida; here, where there were no homes, he would erect a city; and, here, he would create with a love that was almost a passion, the Cloister Inn, at a cost of $1.25 million, the most expensive 100-room hotel every built at that time.

It is said he ravaged Italy and Spain for 16th century antiques, artifacts and building materials for his dream-child, and that he bought so many roof tiles from Spanish priests that ”when it rained in Spain, all church-goers got soaked.” To give a proper aged ambience to his hotel he deliberately chipped stone mantels, whittled edges from wood carvings, used steel wool on frescoes, and even stomped up and down the stairs in hob-nailed boots.

The Cloister, an instant success, opened on 6 February 1926 -- just in time for the Depression. Mizner lost control due to personal reverses, the approach of which had not been missed by some observers: as one historian said, "The Mizner Corporation was fighting after the bell."

Despite earlier problems, now under successive ownerships, there have been continued improvements. The Boca Raton Hotel & Club expanded to 400 rooms in 1930, the Golf Villas and 27-story Tower were added in 1970, and a luxurious Beach Club increased in 1980 guest accommodations by another 212 rooms. Today the resort has three spas, six swimming pools and 30 tennis courts.

Said J. Douglas Kimble, a former assistant manager, "We've got tennis, golf, boating. Nine-hundred rooms varying from economical to expensive. We've all the facilities of a great resort. We're like a cruise ship. If you're not having fun, you're not trying!"

Boca Raton is an interesting city. It has no parking meters, no used car lots, no big-city politics. Here Little League is polo. And thus in this land of enchantment Boca Raton Hotel and Club now comes close to fulfilling the dreams of its original architect. In 1925 Mizner advertised, "I am the greatest resort in the world; I am Boca Raton." Time may come to prove some of his extravagant boasts true but within the resort the charming Cloister stands as a unique hostelry for those who wish to walk with the ghosts of time.