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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   636 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 14, 2026

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I came across the link to a Facebook page for Vanished Florida. I see a lot of hotels in Miami even back to 1910-1920. How did hotels work in 1920?

My understanding of the transportation system in 1920 is a northerner going to Miami the trip would take days. I don’t think you could drive a car from NYC to Miami in 1920. So maybe railroad or boat? I’m guessing a 2-day trip that was fairly expensive?

A modern hotel is essentially transients that stay on average probably 2-3 days. Would a hotel in 1920 in a place like Miami be much longer stays? For the obvious reason that you’re not traveling to a place that takes 4-5 days travel time round trip to stay for a day or two.

If my assumptions are correct it would be interesting staying in a fancy hotel in a vacation destination where everyone is staying month. There would be value in meeting other guests.

Here’s the link. https://www.facebook.com/share/1UKPu8znC9/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Another story: after my grandmother passed, we found a little black notebook from her mother describing a trip from Illinois down to Florida in the late 30s or maybe the 40s. It was more or less the first time she’d traveled. She noted every time they had to stop for gas, the prices, and whether my great-grandfather had to top off the oil. Apparently that was every few stops. Beautiful handwriting, too. Point is, I could see a vast expansion in mobility as automobile and road coverage took off.

I need to see if I can find it again.

Seems like one guy (who became filthy rich by involvement with Standard Oil, and who's wife liked the climate in Florida) basically built/acquired/standardized railroads and put up hotels all over the place:

https://flaglermuseum.org/history/florida-east-coast-railway

This all happened right around the turn of the century though -- by the '10s and '20s I'd think you could pretty easily interconnect up the Eastern Seaboard via Jacksonville -- apparently there was freight service to Cuba (!) even, accomplished by loading cars onto a ferry.

By the mid-20s it looks like you could do NY-Miami in about a day and a half:

https://streamlinermemories.info/FL/SAL26OrangeBlossomSpecial.pdf

https://streamlinermemories.info/FL/SAL27OrangeBlossomSpecial.pdf

Which I guess is a bit longer than driving down there now (Google says 19 hours), but considering that you could eat/drink/sleep/get a haircut on the way, not really that bad! (Certainly nicer than being herded around JFK and getting searched/felt up by the help along the way -- after all one is on vacation; what's the hurry?)

Definitely longer stays. You can see it in a lot of period fiction. Some of that comes down to social class but it applied to labor too.

Prior to rail access, you had coaching inns for travel and boarding houses for longer stays. I think this shaded a little more smoothly from “staying” to “renting.” You had flophouses (where nobody would stay for long if they could help it) all the way up through factory town lodgings or urban apartments. The big hotels take off once railways concentrate a lot more traffic in one spot.

I’m pretty sure individuals used to offer rooms more, too. Some of the quirks of Remains of the Day come from the butler protagonist staying at various private homes which operate more like a bed and breakfast. This is as he’s making a multi-day trip across…England.

You had flophouses (where nobody would stay for long if they could help it) all the way up through factory town lodgings or urban apartments.

Yes, I’m sympathetic to people who say the rent is too damn high, but the period when young people could easily rent an apartment in the big city by themselves without inherited money was very brief historically speaking - it probably lasted less than thirty years (maybe 1955 to 1985?). A century ago, your current equivalent of a modern day 25 year old corporate striver (a young clerk at a bank or insurance company, say, or a trainee typist or secretary) would have stayed in a boarding house in a small room or sharing a small room for a large percentage of their income.

SROs are a casualty of zoning and other housing regulations.

would have stayed in a boarding house in a small room or sharing a small room

It's a shame there aren't many options like that anymore. The last SRO in the city nearest me closed down in the 1970s. I couldn't even tell you about boarding houses, though I'm pretty sure it was even earlier. These days it feels like your options go from house, to apartment, to homeless shelter, to underpass, without any real stops in between.

I’m pretty sure individuals used to offer rooms more, too. Some of the quirks of Remains of the Day come from the butler protagonist staying at various private homes which operate more like a bed and breakfast. This is as he’s making a multi-day trip across…England.

So... AirBnBs?

Yes, but with a particularly gormless, class-driven sort of trust.

It occurred to me the other day that there might well be people who don't know what "BnB" in the name "Airbnb" means.

It’s a dumb term since I’ve never heard of an AirBnB providing breakfast, if it did it would just be a small hotel (or, indeed, a bnb).

My sister went to one out in the New Mexico desert that did.

Unusual, yes, but the exceptions can be amazing. We stayed in an AirBnB in a small town in the middle of Missouri (pop. >5000), where the couple rented out three bedrooms of their enormous farmhouse, and everyone was expected to a shared sit-down breakfast of bacon, sausages, fried potatoes, and fresh-baked bread.

That's just a regular BnB.

I think initially the model was something like couchsurfing but for money. So you literally were supposed to stay at someone's house while it's being occupied as a temporary roommate, in which case sharing the breakfast is only polite. Of course, once it took off it basically turned into less-regulated apartments for (short-term) rent. And now it's just differently-regulated apartments for rent.

The BnB made more sense when people were renting out rooms in their apartment. I know someone renting out rooms in his place in LaTam and well he does provide espresso and usually a weekly barbecue. His dad died and inherited some money so he’s building a new house, but his existing residence his dream is to raise his prices and offer more. The issue is Airbnb people filter out shared spaces and I think it’s hard to raise prices to even equivalent of a standard 1br with kitchen. Not really sure how you would market it but he wants to go more towards I guess the bed and breakfast model.

I once stayed in an Airbnb where the host provided coffee and freshly baked scones every morning, probably the nicest Airbnb I've ever stayed in. But in general, you're right.

People travelled for much longer. One thing that is little commented upon is that white collar ‘PMC’ workers whose jobs existed in, say 1870 or 1920 work far longer hours today than they did back then. A banker (and not just, like, JP Morgan himself) and his family might take a 3 month vacation to Europe, and while he might send and receive the occasional telegram he wasn’t working full time through it. Going anywhere took time. In London, until the popularization of the automobile (which I gather became fully mainstream somewhere between 1910 and 1925 maybe) the smog was often so bad that you might find yourself stranded in some corner of the city and need to spend a night there before heading home in the morning.

People did stay on vacation for much longer periods. Spending ‘the summer’ or ‘the winter’ somewhere was common. In the Swiss mountains, a stay of several weeks, maybe months was common. The working classes would go to nearby resorts by rail for a week or two on an annual trip, but even that’s longer than a lot of trips today. Often railroads were highly vertically integrated, so you’d book travel and accommodation through them and perhaps through their partners. Communication was already pretty good in 1920, you could telegraph (or have the railroad booking office do so) a local hotel agent in Miami and check whether there were any spare rooms and where. I don’t think they would telephone, that was still quite expensive long-distance then. I expect the journey itself might take a couple of days, but they had luxury trains with berths and dining cars.

Miami having hotels stands out to me because it’s not exactly close to anything else in the States so everyone there I would assume is on a longer vacation - basically wintering. Europe in 1920 I assume people who summered in Europe would bounce around cities.

This gets to something I would say is related to the paradox of choice. When people have a lot of people around them it can be more difficult to make friends. No one quite knows who to invest their time and energy into. But if it’s a 100 room Miami hotel in 1920 where the rich people are staying for 1-3 months then it feels like it’s worth meeting the other guest in the hotel.

I remember in Band of Brothers Nixon towards the end of the war said the South Beach clubs and hotels were packed again. Obviously he’s rich so perhaps he’s in the class of people who would know people that would go for months, but maybe by 1944 technology had changed enough to allow more people that experience. Though it still feels 20-ish year off to me before the upper middle class has those types of trips.

In every major war there are a class of people who make a lot of money even if overall people are poorer and indeed even if overall inequality declines (usually due to market crashes or broader asset price declines). War involves many government contracts, price fixing, import and export controls, sometimes currency controls, and all these things create huge room for profiteering and arbitrage.

The Miami of today is full of people who got rich in shady business in Latin America or in crypto. The Miami of 1944 already had plenty of the former but a lot of people who had done well off the war, too.

I doubt this story given the overall decline in yearly hours worked. Perhaps there's some (significantly sized) subgroup where the trend is different, but I'd want to see some evidence of it.

I think the shift probably happened in white collar work between around 1920 and 1950, there were a lot of quiet development around intra office memos, telephone calls becoming ubiquitous, a focus on data, corporate consolidation, vastly increased access to information etc. Also, any change would be swamped by falls in salaried or working class hours as paid vacation, weekends etc became more common.

OWID has a longer time series. A few countries show a postwar bump (the US included), but the overall trend since the late 19th century is one of decline.

That only goes to 1950, though. By which point America is almost fully electrified and coming off a generational economic boom. I wouldn’t be surprised if working hours peaked right after WW2.

A casual search found this totally unbiased article, which suggests the U.S. started movements for paid time off, but Sweden and Germany adopted them first.

I know the eight-hour workday became popular over the course of the 1800s. I could see the paid vacation as a Progressive outgrowth of that sentiment.

The story is not impossible, but it also doesn't match what evidence we have. See also more data.

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