
People Met in Hotel Lobbies (2017) - smacktoward
https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2017/05/people-met-in-hotel-lobbies/
======
sho
Very interesting. I confess I actually would be interested in some sort of
modern equivalent, if that could even exist. Those few times I've been lucky
enough to stay in truly excellent hotels, or international business class
lounges, I have sort of wondered what the other people there are thinking
about and what they might have to say if I were to be so indiscrete to ask.
I'm not saying rich people know it all, or anything in particular - but just
being present in a rarefied place like that does have _some_ story behind it
and I'm endlessly curious to know what that might be.

On another note, also interesting is the frankly crap quality of the scanned
text, which one unfortunately presumes is the only copy remaining in
existence. Is there any current or near future OCR/ML system which might be
capable of transcribing the raw scans with any acceptable level of accuracy?
It's a challenging read even for this human!

~~~
badpun
I'm generally very curious about the internal lives of all people around me. I
don't think that being rich makes, on average, one more or less interesting.
If anything, rich people tend to be more robotic (single-minded and logic-
driven), which would make them less interesting targets for dissection, if it
were somehow possible.

~~~
drclau
Why would you think that about rich people? I'm honestly curious.

~~~
badpun
In order to become rich, you need to be very focused on the goal. This means
that you're either naturally very single-minded, or you've managed to prune
other interests, doubts, thoughts from your head, and just executed
mercilessly for years. In either case, this makes you a rather one-dimensional
person. Additionally, successful people tend to be in always-be-selling mode,
so it's super-hard to have an honest conversation with them.

~~~
closeparen
Most rich people are skilled workers punching a clock, same as everyone else,
but in better compensated fields. Monomaniacal focus on getting rich will make
you an outcast in the societies you need to network with - everything is
supposed to be about passion and impact.

~~~
badpun
> Monomaniacal focus on getting rich will make you an outcast in the societies
> you need to network with - everything is supposed to be about passion and
> impact.

I dunno, I work in a bank and here being semi-openly cynical and greedy is not
seen as faux-pas.

Not to mention that part of being a successful person is being able to fake
whatever needs to be faked in a given environment if necessary - be it
passion, impact or whatever.

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suzzer99
When I went to college in Kirksville, MO - my friends and I were endlessly
entertained to see local newspaper report stuff like "Mr. and Mrs. Edwin
Freese visited Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hanover after church on Sunday." There was
an entire page of this stuff.

Apparently (I'm told) small town papers still do this.

~~~
jnbiche
It's not just small-town newspapers. Think of society pages of all the big
newspapers (some still have them). And for example the wedding pages of the NY
Times.

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toyg
Interesting to note how the man clamouring for a better hotel uses size as a
proxy for quality: paraphrasing slightly, "if only we had a massive hotel,
more rich people would come and feel at ease!".

These days one would probably demand the very opposite.

~~~
rolleiflex
This is quite common in parts of the world that are just getting to a modicum
of wealth. For example, I landed to the new Istanbul Airport a few days ago.
Its main premise, the way it's pitched to the (largely indifferent) public, is
that it's the largest airport in the world, one that is the size of Manhattan.

Meanwhile, I spent four hours coming into the actual city from there. It's
dreadful.

~~~
ghaff
Though that's pretty unavoidable if you need to add a larger airport to a city
whose existing airport is space constrained. You often have to go pretty far
out to get to lots of near-empty space where you can site the new airport.

~~~
rolleiflex
That is true, though it’s still shockingly poor planning to open the airport
and close the old one before the bullet train interlink starts to serve the
new one.

~~~
mertd
Urban planning took a back seat because they rushed to open it before the
municipal elections. Fortunately the voters are not amused by the irony
anymore.

------
devchix
In the same spirit, but in the blue-collar band of the wealth spectrum, _This
American Life_ camped out for 24 hours at a Chicago diner called The Golden
Apple and recorded the conversations of people who happened to be there. The
episode is a gem.

 _24 Hours at the Golden Apple_ (November 2000)
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/172/24-hours-at-the-
golden-...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/172/24-hours-at-the-golden-apple)

~~~
whatshisface
That's not a very social thing to do. I wouldn't want somebody camping out and
recording my conversations.

~~~
devchix
I'm sorry to be unclear, the reporter interviewed the diners and the episode
was a collection of conversations of the diners with their friends (used with
the diner's permissions), and of the diners with the reporter. In no way was
it surreptitious.

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threwawasy1228
Last time I met someone at a higher end hotel bar who sat next to me, it was
pretty terrible. He was a truck driving member of the furry fandom from West
Virginia, and he seemed pretty mentally unstable. Ruined what was otherwise a
top class meal.

------
muse900
I feel like this was a thing back then, not only because the "strong and
powerful" men of that ERA where in and out of a hotel lobby but also cause
journalism was based on going out to get/make a story.

Nowadays I feel like real journalism is a very small fraction of the
journalism field in general and I feel like most news/media outlets (paper,
tv, blogs) are just copy pasting stories from others in a bad manner as well,
changing them up to feel a bit more "wow this thing happened", and you end up
with a story that has nothing to do with the original.

We do live in the ERA of over-information and lazy journalism. A news outlet
in most cases doesn't need to go out of their way to find the story and the
cases that happens is very limited nowadays. The media will just display
anything that comes their way on steroids to make it interesting... and thats
why I don't watch the news :)

On the other hand I am pretty certain there are still Hotels in Europe where
the strong and powerful pass through on a daily basis, and there are up and
coming smart hotels which have a lobby that I've personally seen the next tech
idea being discussed from its ground.

~~~
tnolet
Sad to read you have such a narrow view of the news media. Maybe it’s that way
in your home country. Or maybe some specific outlets have spoiled it for the
others.

If you’re ever in Germany or the Netherlands I’d be happy to show you how my
partner (a journalist for a national broadcaster) and her coworkers go about
it.

It’s the opposite of lazy, copy & paste. It’s hard working, diligent, critical
etc.

~~~
Aeolun
I think the problem is that even though maybe a 100 different unique stories
are crafted by dilligent, hard-working people, there are a 100,000 others that
are just copied from those originals.

If you just take a casual glance through a few tens of articles, everything
will look like a carbon copy.

~~~
ghaff
And no small number of them are largely cut-and-pasted or computer-written
from a press release. (Including at the few outlets which also craft a few
unique stories to keep up their brand.)

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z3t4
Im a bit suprised that the language reads like modern American English. When
reading something old in my native language its very foreign.

~~~
Aeolun
This is 1890. It’s not that crazy, and the wording and expressions used are
clearly a bit different.

If you go back to 1500s english it also becomes pretty much incomprehensible.

Is your native language impossible to read if you go back to only 1900? I find
it difficult to believe that it could change that much, but it would be
interesting.

~~~
vidarh
I think few languages changed enough to be incomprehensible, on that period,
but e.g the Norwegian of 1890 was basically Danish (over simplifying as we
have a second language composed from dialects) and the Danish of the era was
sufficiently closer to German that when I studied German I read a ca. 1900
Danish edition of Faust in parallel with the German because it was sufficient
a 'midpoint' to help understand everything from sentence structure to
vocabulary.

It would definitively be readable to a modern reader, but the differences can
in some texts be sufficient to require a lot more conscious effort where
English from that era seems to 'just' seem a bit odd and overly formal.

I do think it also depends a great deal if you know any related languages. E.g
if you understand German and Danish, older Norwegian makes sense - I remember
when it clicked for me that the best way of improving my German grammar was to
when in doubt think about how older more formal Norwegian forms would be. I
read a lot of adventure novels from the early 1900's, so I was familiar with
that.

But I know class mates who were totally unfamiliar with Norwegian literature
from that era who while they'd certainly understand it would found it more of
an effort.

~~~
Symbiote
Some Swedes told me they struggled to understand old texts because there were
significant changes to the orthography. I think the text we were looking at
was the Oath of Allegiance [1], but I might be mistaken.

(I'm learning Danish: if in doubt about grammar, I think "how would
Shakespeare say it?").

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Allegiance_(Sweden)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Allegiance_\(Sweden\))

~~~
vidarh
I think short texts are often worse, actually, because just a few words with
insufficient context can throw you off, and in the case of this like oaths the
sentence structure is often atrocious with interjections that people often
have problems with.

E.g. in that text, I understood everything except "städse" and "huld" without
having to look it up. You could do a Norwegian translation pretty much word
for word with the same sentence structure.

But a lot of people used to modern Scandinavian languages at least, and I get
the impression the same is true for modern English readers, do have problems
dealing sentences with lots of interjections and/or where you need to
metaphorically push lots of context onto the stack before it all ties up at
the end. I recall coming across that already at school - since I read a lot of
older books I was used to it, but most of my class mates were not. And it's
reflected in my writing even today, 30+ years later, to the point where I need
to consciously avoid just nesting clauses all over the place.

------
PhasmaFelis
The author teases Ira Barnett of Louisville, Kentucky ("He’s a pretty big
wheel down at the cracker factory"), but he seems to be fairly self-aware:

> _I don’t know as there is much in what we are doing to interest the public,
> except the price of the article, and, as I said before, that will remain
> unchanged._

Basically "I make crackers. Why are you talking to me?"

------
FabHK
Lovely euphemism for booze: "large stocks of coolness and ennui-dispellers are
kept constantly on ice" :-)

------
tomohawk
> before two World Wars made Washington the capital of the free world

More like before FDR's massive expansion of the federal government. Today,
it's hard to believe how unimportant the federal government was in most areas
of peoples lives.

~~~
qaq
As a result top 5 counties by median household income are around DC.

~~~
esoterica
That's largely due to the arbitrary way county lines are drawn. Parts of San
Francisco and Manhattan are far wealthier than the DC suburbs, but they share
a county with lots of poor people who drag the median household income down.

~~~
rolltiide
suburbs don't bother with rent control and public housing, repurposing cities
to take 100% of the criticism and costs for it.

it also works

------
bookofjoe
Prince's 1984 song:
[https://youtu.be/j8oxXkUjYHg](https://youtu.be/j8oxXkUjYHg)

------
soniman
I wonder if some of these from the "Arlington" hotel were actually from
Arlington, VA? Arlington used to be part of the District before 1847. It's
impossible to search for the answer, too many Arlington hotel results.

~~~
asveikau
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Hotel_(Washington,_D...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_Hotel_\(Washington,_D.C.\))

[http://www.streetsofwashington.com/2010/08/opulent-
arlington...](http://www.streetsofwashington.com/2010/08/opulent-arlington-
hotel.html)

I was born in DC more than 70 years after said hotel was demolished, however,
I can recognize by the way they write that "The Arlington" (always appearing
with an article) is presumably a place in the District. No one would presume
that kind of social crowd to be in Virginia, especially the further you go
back in time.

Googling around I found a claim that it was on the current site of the
Veterans Affairs offices, which would put it on Vermont Ave NW near I St.

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rolltiide
I love the bit about English vs American clothes "I'm not trying to make a
tariff argument out of it, but American clothes are just better!"

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nullwasamistake
Airline lounges and expensive "dinner clubs" have largely replaced this and
serve a similar purpose. Once you break the upper crust you start getting
invited to fancy dinners corporate and charity auctions too

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CydeWeys
It would be awesome if this article could be made more accessible by
transcribing the article photos. I'm sighted and some of these are hard to
read for me.

~~~
smacktoward
I agree, so I went back and added transcriptions for all the images. Thanks
for pressing on accessibility, it's an important and under-appreciated
subject.

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HeavenBanned
It's kind of like the "man on the street" interviews ...very intriguing
vignettes. I quite liked the Confederate veteran story.

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titusjohnson
These excerpts would make an amazing coffee table or bathroom book.

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karmakaze
Tesla charging stations might qualify. My take would be that the industries
don't have that time to spare.

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giorgioz
I often wonder where is nowadays a place to meet intellectually stimulating
people. Right now my betting money is on digital nomads' meetups in cities
like Chiang Mai (Thailand), Budapest (Hungary) and Medellin (Colombia).

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Haga
Love the cracker cartel conference on how to reduce cost of ingredients.

