Word: hotelful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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World's Biggest. It was by equally shrewd deals that Connie Hilton had become the world's biggest hotelman. His 13 hotels in the U.S., Mexico and Puerto Rico-ranging from a small hotel in Lubbock, Texas to Manhattan's famed Waldorf-Astoria-have an estimated worth of $125 million and a replacement value of $175 million. He employs 11,250 people, and likes to boast that in his 12,500 rooms he "could sleep in a different bed every night for 40 years...
...Angeles, Hilton went shopping in New York. "When I saw all those people in the streets, I didn't see how you could lose money," he says. "And I had to establish myself in New York. I could borrow money from my Texas friends to buy a small hotel, but only in New York could I get the millions I wanted to swing the deals I had in mind." The first deal looked too good to Hilton. The famed Ritz Hotel was offered to him for $700,000 and he turned it down. Said he: "I thought they were...
White Elephant. In Chicago, Hilton ran into tradition of another kind. For years the $30 million Stevens, world's biggest (3,000 rooms) hotel, had stood like a half-filled honeycomb as a monument to the folly of its builders. The Army used it as a barracks at the beginning of the war, and in 1943 Chicago Contractor Stephen Healy bought the white elephant and caught Hilton's eye by making it pay in the war boom that was suddenly filling all hotels. But when Hilton began to bargain for the Stevens, he met his match in Healy...
...Plaza was to New Yorkers. To get it lock, stock and history, Hilton teamed up with Builder Henry Crown (TIME, Nov. 28) and signed the biggest check of his career-$7,500,000-as a down payment. For a total of $19,385,000 he picked up a hotel that had cost $25,800,000 to build on land worth $10,000,000. He thought that it was even a better bargain than the Stevens...
Though each of Hilton's hotels is different from the others, together they form a rich pattern of 20th Century U.S. hotel life. In the U.S., more than any other country, the big hotel has become a city in itself. There, says Hilton, "you could live out a full life without ever going out of doors. They have nightclubs, banquet halls and shopping centers. You can read a book in the library and use the safe deposit vault as a bank. If you get sick, there's a hospital, with a doctor and a nurse. You can park...