Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn by Jan Whitaker

Author:Jan Whitaker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

TEA ROOM IN THE COPLEY-PLAZA HOTEL IN BOSTON, AROUND 1915.

Evidently the Plaza met the requirements of at least one discerning British visitor in 1913. (Tea was something British tourists always checked out in America and usually complained bitterly about.) She found the Plaza acceptable, but the Manhattan Hotel was too full of “young girls and chappies from the schools.” The Ritz Hotel and Sherry’s Restaurant were too proper and dull, and the rest “more or less impossible,” but she loved the giant palms and tiny tables at the Plaza.

The garden look, with luxurious profusions of flowers and plants, some strung from the ceilings, was so popular in this era that, according to the New York Times in March of 1910, “One hotel manager said that his flower bill was larger than his bill for the servants employed in the tea room.” Wisteria, ferns, and smilax were also commonly used in hotel tea rooms. The Hotel Jefferson in St. Louis had a ceiling so draped with wisteria, it nearly brushed the heads of the Japanese servers. An Oriental motif was carried out in gilt bamboo-style chairs and red-and-white china tea sets. The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, created a Wisteria Room, with living trees, a wisteria-draped ceiling, huge latticed windows, and garden statuary. Wicker furniture was often used to enhance the garden feeling, as was done at the Muehlebach and the Prince George Hotel in New York City, where vines appeared to halfway cover the backlighted faux-glass ceiling. At the Menger in San Antonio, Texas, vines trailed up and over doorways and grew from wall sconces, while baskets of flowers adorned small tables throughout the series of spacious tea rooms. At the tea room of the Biltmore Ice Gardens in New York, guests sat on chairs covered in floral upholstery, amid ferns and vines, as they watched ice-skaters outside the plate-glass windows in winter. In summer an Italian sunken garden replaced the ice rink.

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