Word: hotelmen
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Last week there was a good reason: a lot of the hotelmen-gamblers were rolling snake eyes. Less than five months after it opened, the 250 room, $5 million Royal Nevada was losing so much money that it was being taken over by the Desert Inn, a comparative oldtimer. The veteran management of the Flamingo hotel was moving in to rescue the shaky $8,000,000 Riviera. The $3,000,000 Moulin Rouge, built to lure in Negroes, had to be reorganized. Last week the well-established Sands took over the three-month-old, $4,000,000 Dunes...
Ever since the Depression caught U.S. hotelmen overexpanded, they have been chary of risking money on new hotels. In 20 years, only three big new hotels have gone up: Cincinnati's Terrace Plaza, Washington's Statler, Houston's Shamrock...
...Manhattan, big (6 ft.), drawling Arthur F. Douglas, president of the Hotels Statler Co., Inc., thought it was time for a change; the nation's growth had made the caution of hotelmen shortsighted. Last week he signed construction contracts for a new $20 million Statler in downtown Los Angeles. It will be the biggest new U.S. hotel since the Waldorf-Astoria...
Some rival Los Angeles hotelmen shook their heads at Douglas' "big gamble." They thought that his heart-of-downtown location was a "decaying" area, and his building costs were much too high (about $12,500 a room v. $9,000 for Washington's Hotel Statler built in 1943). But Douglas was counting on big convention trade, extra business from a big office building which will adjoin the hotel, and most of all on the nomadic U.S. people, whose travel has greatly increased. Said Douglas: "Our rates will be on a par with those of other leading Los Angeles...
Things to Come. There are also a few other clouds ahead. Tourist courts and motels are already giving Hilton and other hotelmen hard competition. "We have to keep making our hotels better," says Connie Hilton. "Rooms will have to be larger and they'll have to be soundproofed . . . They will have books, magazines and newspapers, just like a home. They will have radio and television and recording attachments on the telephones so that the guest will receive his messages in the actual words in which they're given. Bathrooms, besides their present equipment, will have ultraviolet-ray machines...