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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   614 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

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.

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.

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