Facilities offering hospitality to travelers’ date to our earliest civilizations and in fact have been in evidence since ancient Persia. These were places where you would exchange money or goods for a temporary or semi-permanent roof over your head. This was especially important at this early time because journeys were mostly taken by foot (or horse or cart much later) so getting to most places took much longer than it does now. While this might match the concept of hotel as we now know it, back then a hotel stay was often just a room or two overnight in someone’s dwelling. Often, it was actually the stable. While today we may look at it as further representation of their poverty-stricken traveler’s status, The Holy Family’s’ lodging that night in a stable was very commonplace. At this point, hotels were somewhere to stay out of necessity, as part of a journey – rather than somewhere to make a journey to.
The Latin word Hospitia, gives us the English word hospitality, but it was used originally to describe rooms rented in private homes or their outbuildings. Eventually, the hospitiae started to serve food and drink and began to resemble more like someplace that people today would recognize as accommodations to stay for holiday purposes. Likewise, “hospitals” for recuperation and rest were built at the location of Grecian thermal baths. The Romans constructed special “mansions” (derived from Old French mansio –dwelling) to provide accommodations for travelers on government business. Romans also built thermal baths in England, Switzerland, and the Middle East. Finally, hotel, or the concept of what we think of as a hotel, also goes back to ancient Babylonian bureaucrats who actually enforced regulations concerning the city’s lodgings. Accommodations called inns came about in the cities and towns of Persia, now Iran, to temporarily house merchants as they travelled to their business destinations. In the Middle Ages, monasteries and abbeys offered refuge and many religious orders also built inns, hospices and hospitals to care for those on the move. These provided temporary shelter and many had attached stables which allowed horses to be changed more easily. Refuges, also called sanctuaries sprang up especially during the times of pilgrimage, (visiting a place of religious importance), or to house crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. At the same time, Caravanserais (old Persian for (roadside inns) sprung up as resting places for business or religious travelers along Middle Eastern paths.
The history of hotels is intimately connected to that of civilizations, or is really a significant part of that history. Interestingly, much of ancient travel was for religious purposes, as is much, still, of modern travel. The largest present mass travel assemblage is religious and takes place in India at the Kumbh Mela attracting up to 120 million pilgrims, or the Hajj to Mecca, required once in the life of a Muslim.
With an increase in travelling, for any and all those reasons, travelling itself became progressively riskier. This spurred the growth of the inn.
It was not just Europe or the Middle East where we see the birth of the hotel. Guinness World Records recognize Japan’s Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, founded some time between 704 and 710, as the oldest hotel in the world.
The birth of the hotel as an industry in Europe came about because both bureaucrats in both Medieval France and England required more formal protocols and actual inspections for innkeeping.
In fifteenth century France, a law required that hotels keep a register of quests. The real precursor to the modern hotel was the inn of Medieval Europe. For a period of some 200 hundred years from the mid-17th century, coaching inns (places to lodge and park their coaches and animals) served as a place of billeting. Inns began to cater to wealthier clients in the mid-18th century, and consequently grew in grandeur and in the level of service. Hotels proliferated throughout Western Europe and North America in the early 19th century, and luxury hotels began to spring up in the latter part of the 19th century, particularly in the United States.
Interestingly, the architecture of English inns began to be standardized in the 18th century. A paved interior courtyard had access through an arch. Bedrooms were on two opposite sides of the courtyard, public rooms and the kitchen were in the front, and the stables and storerooms were at the back. The era of signage and advertising began with the inn, as distinctive signs were hung outside of establishments to advertise their specialties. In only a few decades, the first for public-use land conveyances, stagecoaches, began to follow timetables.
Cities centers began to form, usually around governmental buildings, and then in New York City, first of all, and soon Copenhagen, hotels – then called public houses, often just repurposed private homes, were established to provide “reliable” accommodations for travelers. This model got its start in the United States right at the time the new country was taking form. These early inns and taverns were frequently dirty, flea-infested, and known for poor food and service. They typically had six to ten rooms. Travelers often shared rooms and even beds with strangers. The first deluxe hotel in a city center, The Tremont, in Boston, was built in 1829. It offered inside toilets, locks on doors, and an “a la carte” menu. Notable guests included Davy Crockett and Charles Dickens. In New York City, the Holt Hotel was the first to provide its guests with lifts for their luggage, and the New York Hotel was the first to provide private bathrooms within the room. In Chicago in 1870, The Palmer House Hotel was the first hotel structure to be fire-resistant, and New York’s Netherland Hotel was the first to provide all it’s guests with their own telephone. Finally, in 1907, The Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City instituted elevators for its guests. They were the first to also pioneer electric service and lights in 1899. The Fifth Avenue Hotel also was the first to provide bathrooms with both hot and cold running water and central heating. This service ended the guest’s need to purchase wood or coal for their room’s fireplaces.
The latest statistics show that the United States has by far the most hotel rooms in the world at about 5,000,000 and the average number of rooms in each is 93. China is second, world-wide, with more than 1,500,000 and the average hotel has 132 rooms. The global total of hotel rooms is more than 21,000,000.
ROOM AND BOARD
Boarding houses, long an American staple and way-of-life across the country, served many functions. A boarding house is a house, frequently a family home, in which lodgers (from the Old French: loge meaning (hut or small house) may rent one or more rooms on a nightly basis, but more often for extended periods of weeks, months and even years. The common parts of the house are maintained by the owners, and some other services may be supplied. Board, as part of the concept, meant food would be provided for a part of the total cost. (Alternatively, board means the table the food is served on.) Room and board commonly entails that the person usually, but not always, has a private room, and shares the rest of the “house” with others, taking meals there. To complete the idea, half-board means breakfast and dinner meals. Full board means three daily meals.
Boarding houses were common in American cities throughout the 19th century and up until the 1950’s. In Boston, in the early years of the 19th century, when landlords and their boarders were added up, between one-third and one-half of the entire city population lived in a boarding house. Boarding houses ran from large, purpose-built edifices down to “genteel ladies” who rented a room or two as a way to meet ends. Large houses were converted to boarding houses as wealthy families moved to more fashionable neighborhood houses. In those times, the boarders ran the gamut from well-to-do businessmen to common laborers, and both single people to families. In the 19th century, a large percentage of urban owners rented rooms to boarders. In New York City and the surrounding areas, the cost of living in boarding houses ranged from $2.50 a day to $40 dollars a week. Some boarding houses catered to people with particular occupations.
Social change was inevitable in boarding house living. In many instances, family members, sons and daughters, would move to a large city, away from their families, and live and interact with strangers. This distancing from the immediate family frequently resulted in anxiety and suspicion that the residents of boarding houses were not respectable because they “came from somewhere else” or “away.” The fear was that their son or daughter, as a boarder was away from a family’s norms and were being subject to outsiders and “foreign” influences. Boarding houses did have advantages like promoting social mixing, but again, for some this was sometimes viewed as disadvantageous or even dangerous.
The Pacetti Hotel’s beginning, as a get-a-way, vacation “resort,” is so like many other hotels and boarding houses. In the late 19th century through the 1960’s a boarding house culture developed in the New York’s Catskill Mountains just north of New York City, in the same way that bred the Pacetti Hotel’s ethos. A mom and pop family who lived in a beautiful setting on an inlet in East Central Florida, or in Upstate New York’s verdant Greene or Sullivan County, far away from the cares of the urban world, began to see the advantages of having lodgers and guests to share their home. Both families saw some success with this venture of renting out rooms, and they recognized they needed some more for expansion. They sold some of their original farmland, and eventually built a successful resort keeping it in the family for several generations. Helpful to the Pacetti family in Florida was the vision and foresightedness of an artist friend who camped and fished nearby before moving in with them and eventually clerking for them. This Florida family was able to enlarge the original home using funds gained from the sale of ten acres to the Federal Government for the building of a lighthouse at that inlet, not far from their home. The expanded home became an even more popular boarding house and successful hotel, and stayed in the family until the death of the matriarch of the family. For another one hundred years the property went from a vacation home for wealthy families to ownership by a philanthropic foundation.
While the New York family didn’t have the government wanting to build a lighthouse on some property, they did have pasture land amid the surrounding woods to build the first swimming pool in that part of the Catskills, so their guests would not have to cool off in the nearby Catskill Creek. They could save that for fishing.
The Pacetti Hotel was purchased by the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse Preservation Association in 2019, and is opened to the public in August of 2024.