My brother has this fascination with old hotels; he likes to hunt them out and stay at, or at least visit, them as often as he can manage. Sometimes this is all right, as at last Thanksgiving, when he arranged for us to stay at the Blackstone Hotel in Fort Worth. That one was a 1920s luxury hotel that had almost been torn down but was saved at the last minute, restored to a fare-thee-well, and turned into a boutique hotel by Marriott, courtesy of a ten-year bed-tax forgiveness by the City of Fort Worth to get Marriott to agree to do the project.
Then there are the ones like the Luther Hotel.
The Luther is a huge, ramshackle beachfront hotel in Palacios, Texas, on Matagorda Bay. It’s an old-time summer resort hotel, built in 1902 and has survived many storms and one bodily relocation more or less intact. What hasn’t happened to it is any kind of modernization. The general decor seems to be frozen somewhere around 1940, with some more recent furniture in the common areas, but nothing later than 1970. The second-floor hallway—three stories, no elevators—has balding, orange nearly-shag carpeting. It’s something like staying at your grandparents’ house, which hasn’t been redecorated since your parents were kids, and that your grandparents can’t see well enough to realize everything in the house is threadbare and moth-eaten. Travel writers kindly call the hotel “unchanged” (isn’t THAT the truth!) and “quaint;” with the injection of two or three million dollars’ worth of remodeling and infrastructure updates it might aspire to quaint. My own impressions range from “dilapidated” to “shabby” to “firetrap.”
The outside, in best seaside tradition, needs painting and has needed it for years. People in coastal communities seem to have a love/hate relationship with paint; the love (and the paint) goes onto their boats and stuff that has to go in the water, and everything else gets left. The hotel has thirty-eight rooms and suites; there’s also a row of eight stuccoed motor-courts on the edge of the property, but they’ve been allowed to go down so far that they’re now beyond repair, and the managers, an elderly couple who’ve run the place for years, say they’ll have to be torn down soon—although I think “soon” is probably being expressed in geological terms, and they’ll actually fall down first, the way things in small towns do.
We have what passes for a “suite,” and I suppose it is, by fishing resort standards. It has one minuscule and one reasonable-sized bedroom, two airliner-size bathrooms that were carved out of the bedrooms, which is why our bedroom is tiny, nearly full-size kitchen (with non-working range but working fridge), and a common entryway/“sitting room.” Our room does have a period ceiling fan—“period” meaning it has one speed, high. I don’t think there’s a stick of furniture in the bedroom that dates later than World War II, the 1970s velveteen loveseat in the sitting area has an enormous rip in one arm that someone tried (and failed) to conceal with strategically placed pillows, and our bedstead is so wobbly that I go in hourly fear of it collapsing. (I may yet get to re-tell James Thurber’s “The Night the Bed Fell” at first hand.) Air conditioning is courtesy of window units which do, for a mercy, cool efficiently.
Our shower may be the damnedest piece of the whole experience. Besides the hot and cold taps, there’s an ordinary gate valve spliced into the pipe just behind the (leaky) shower head, and that is what controls the water flow. It’s handyman engineering—while it may do the job, it’s not elegant and certainly not the best solution.
Despite all this, the hotel is full for the weekend, and it seems to be one of those places people keep coming back to, perhaps for sentimental reasons. Guests actually talk to one another in the lobby and on the front porch—the hotel does have a two-story-tall front portico, complete with white-painted slat-back rocking chairs. The Luther must have some appeal that I’m missing, though; I can’t see how anyone could possibly be staying here for the creature comforts.
To cap the experience, there are no room phones, sure as hell no Net access, and I can’t even find a coffee shop with a hot spot in a town of five thousand people, it’s so far off the backbone, so posting this will have to wait until I return to civilization Sunday.
The hotel, from the municipal boardwalk
The motor courts
Motor court wall damage
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