THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Stephen Lewis's atmospheric memoir inevitably calls to mind another Manhattan hotel kid: Eloise, the tyke who lived at the Plaza in the series of children's...
...This was bad news for the Taft...
...The Standard Reader Books in Brief Stephen Lewis's atmospheric memoir inevitably calls to mind another Manhattan hotel kid: Eloise, the tyke who lived at the Plaza in the series of children's books by Kay Thompson...
...A three-course lunch in the coffee shop was 35 cents, and downstairs in the Taft Grill the house band led by Vincent Lopez played dance tunes...
...The outcome was reminiscent of Bruce Jay Friedman's novel Stern, in which a city family moves to the suburbs only to find that their offspring is afraid of grass...
...In addition to weaving into the drama the stories of colleagues, wives, parents, and brothers, Halber-stam notes the firehouse resistance to outside "meddling...
...The period covered in Hotel Kid is a frozen moment of the Big Band era, a snap shot of the Depression, and the last successful stand of the grand hotels...
...Lewis grew up during the palmy 1930s days of a Times Square hotel that boasted 2,000 rooms...
...Lewis's mother was well adjusted to life as a hotel shut-in, but she felt that Lewis and his younger brother were in need of male "role models" from the outside world...
...With Lax came his college roommate, Thomas Merton, en route to becoming a Trappist monk...
...The boy was in touch with the infrastructure from bellmen to the complaint department...
...The FDNY family is overwhelmingly male and heavily Irish Catholic: "It is almost as if there is a certain DNA strand found in firefighting families," writes Halberstam, "where the men are pulled toward the job because their fathers and uncles were firemen...
...Lax and Merton were more interested in pondering metaphysics than in teaching their charge manly skills like how to play catch...
...Frederick R. Lynch...
...But the similarity is only residential...
...But the hotel itself made a memorable impression...
...People think they know what we do, but they don't," a FDNY veteran tells David Halberstam, whose Firehouse is a remarkable study of a tightly knit world and the impact September 11 had upon it...
...Eloise was a guest...
...So she called Columbia University for a tutor, who turned out to be Robert Lax, before he achieved legendary status as a poet...
...The Lewises made another stab at giving their sons a more normal boyhood by renting a house in suburban New Rochelle...
...But the real life lived by firemen remains a mystery...
...In profiling the 13 men of a Manhattan firehouse who were on duty that morning (12 of whom perished), Halberstam reveals the tradition, history, family, and honor pulsing through the firehouse...
...His meals were delivered by room service, and his nanny was a chambermaid...
...At the close of the book, Lewis recounts a visit he paid to the old hotel during its demolition...
...Halberstam sympathetically shows that firefighters are neither gods nor gremlins but human beings molded by a complex web of deeply rooted institutions...
...This ambience could get claustrophobic, since Times Square, obviously, was off limits as a playground...
...Before September 11, resistance to affirmative action got firefighters labeled un-heroic and reactionary...
...They left Stephen "as far from the mainstream as ever...
...By the end of the era, World War II had unleashed massive social change, including the investment capital needed for heavy construction...
...It was gutted and cannibalized into a boutique hotel attached to a condo...
...When it turned out that the actual room count was 1,437, his father explained the differential was due to "advertising...
...In The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton recalls Lax "living at the Hotel Taft, tutoring the children of the manager, and having access to an ice box full of cold chicken at all hours of the day and night...
...Lewis, whose father was head innkeeper of New York's Hotel Taft, was plugged into management...
...Martin Levin New York City's firefighters became national heroes when 343 of them died trying to help others escape the World Trade Center on September 11...
...Hotel Kid has breathed so much life into the place that its extinction achieves a human poignance...
Vol. 7 • August 2002 • No. 47
