. . . but you can never leave

by

Lauren Roberts

That’s what Stephen Lewis’ Hotel Kid: A Times Square Childhood (Paul Dry Books; $22.95, hardcover; $12.95, softcover) is—an engaging, delightful memoir of growing up in New York’s famous Hotel Taft during its glory days of the 1930s and 1940s.

The Taft was a landmark, the largest hotel in midtown Manhattan and, until Rockefeller Center was erected, the tallest. It overlooked the Roxy Theatre and was within walking distance of more than 25 other theaters. It advertised “2000 Rooms With Bath on Times Square and Radio City,” a marketing illusion that provided great copy if not the literal truth. Nevertheless, the Taft was an illustrious hotel for guests and a fantasyland if a controlled one for its manager’s sons. 

Lewis moved into the hotel at 18 months of age and didn’t leave until he was an adult. His growing up years were spent with his parents and younger brother in the four-room suite on the fifteenth floor they called home, being waited on by deferential staff, and living and learning about life in a way most of us cannot imagine. (By third grade he knew how to use a swizzle stick, but didn’t learn what storm windows were until he was forty.)

“Children who visit their father’s law office or paint factory once a year are momentarily embarrassed at the fuss made over them by the people who work there,” he writes. “Peter and I were fussed over at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, when we went out, when we came back in, when we went downstairs to the newsstand for a candy bar. When we were old enough for school, we chatted with more than a dozen friends before we left the building . . .”

More so than his father whom he was ordered not to disturb when on duty, it is his mother who dominates this memoir much as she did her children’s lives. This was a woman who wore the crown of Manager’s Wife with aplomb. “When Mother awoke, between nine and ten, she lit a cigarette and picked up the phone. ‘Operator, could you please tell me the correct time?’” She rarely went out. There was no need. Laundry and dry cleaning were picked up and delivered; cigarettes, magazines and newspapers were sent up, food was free and need only be signed for, clothes could be ordered from Saks Fifth Avenue and were sent over. Friends and family came to visit for the daily open house and free food—platters of roast beef, sliced chicken, turkey breast followed by hours of card games. But as Lewis laments in one forlorn phrase, “. . . I’d get some faint sense of the emptiness of Mother’s days.”

Empty they may have been, but dull they were not. Once, having ordered sauerkraut from room service and being sent a nicely buttered and garnished dish, she returned it, accompanied by a phone call letting them know she wanted it plain, just the way it came from a can. Four minutes later, she got a cold, opened can of sauerkraut. 

Instead of the Simon Says or Hide ‘n Seek games of the suburbs with their lawns and yards, he and his brother had to make do with the hotel roof that held a slide, a sandbox and a fire engine with pedals. When they grew old enough to roam the hotel by themselves, their games utilized the elevators, corridors, fire stairs, parapets and ladders. But, as he admits, they spent most of their days in their apartment. Privacy was hard to find, what there was for him was mostly self-created in his own mind.
 
One of the most poignant aspects of the story is the contrast he draws between his family’s privileged life and that of others when they venture out. Remember that the 1930s were the years of the Great Depression. Unemployment was brutal. Though limited in its empathy—this is, after all, a memoir, not a history—Lewis remembers and relates painful memories, many of them connected with the fallout of the Depression. “Returning home on Sixth Avenue,” he writes, “we hurried past clumps of men in front of employment agencies—just storefronts whose doors and windows were pasted over with handwritten notices of low-paying jobs. Men in shabby jackets or threadbare coats paid no attention to us but made me uncomfortable all the same.” It also disturbed him when he and his brother, while feeding the ducks and pigeons in the park, were approached by two boys their own age. Rather than use the roll they asked for to feed the birds, one of the boys tried to eat it. “Of course, we should have brought more rolls, rather than none, but reality outside the comfortable cocoon of the hotel embarrassed us.”

Later, in a belated attempt to give their sons a chance at suburban life, Lewis’ parents actually bought a home and moved out of the hotel; the result was more comical than helpful. For the first time they learned what a walk and a driveway was. They learned to take out the garbage; they learned that food came from grocery stores and not waiters. They didn’t even know to refuse a demand by hooligans for their bicycle’s bells; as he writes, “we hadn’t learned how to react to people whose agendas didn’t begin with making us happy.” They moved back.

Reading this reminded me of the Eagles’ song, Hotel California, in which they bemoan the fact that they can check out, but they can never leave. In a sense, that’s what happened to Stephen Lewis, his brother and his parents. His father did retire, and they moved to Florida. He and his brother both married; neither works in a hotel. But the grip of hotel life, of its charms and its drawbacks, infused the balance of their lives with something that seems unreal to most of us. Maybe it’s like room service. For this kid growing up in the Hotel Taft, it was a fact of life. For the rest of us, it is a special treat that should be savored should we ever be lucky enough to be invited in. Hotel Kid: A Times Square Childhood is that invitation. And we are indeed lucky.


Since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to almost anyone who will listen. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 700 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it