"They're Rooms — Not Units"
CORNELL UNIVERSITY has a whole school devoted to hotel administration. Dartmouth has no formal offerings in the field, but during the winter and spring terms a short, intensive course has been available. It consists entirely of a visit to the premises of the new Hanover Inn Motor Lodge. Its faculty: Prof. James T. McFate, manager.
As you read this the new two-story, 40-room Motor Lodge should be in operation; the course will have ended; the guests will be the paying variety.
The Motor Lodge faces (but at an eyes-left) the auditorium block of the Hopkins Center on Lebanon Street. The exterior is of contemporary design; the interior is New England. It is of concrete-block construction finished in redwood with gray trim and blue panels beneath the large picture windows. Each room has a private bath-shower, double or twin beds and most have a sofa-bed that can be opened for the family trade so that the room will sleep four. The architect was W. Brooke Fleck of Hanover; the builder is the Trumbull-Nelson Co., also of Hanover.
The foregoing is a college-catalogue-type description. To appreciate the Motor Lodge fully you must take the full course. It starts at the Inn Dining Room at lunch and your classroom notes, scribbled hastily over fried shrimp, garden salad, vegetable and coffee, reveal the following reasons and concepts:
The Inn suffers, even more than most Northern New England hostels, from the feast-and-famine cycle. In the past several years occupancy has averaged 64 to 68 per cent (about the national average) but there have been times when the Inn's 74 rooms could have been sold out many times over. Convocations, commencements, football games, reunions are just some of these occasions. The Inn was sold out on 88 nights in 1959, 63 nights in 1958 and 93 in 1951, for instance.
The Inn's Board of Overseers and the College's Trustees considered these facts and the future potential of an associated motor lodge and decided to go ahead with construction.
The Overseers were enthusiastic. Chairman Chandler H. Foster '15 named Eugene P. Tamburi '36 a one-man committee to work with those in Hanover on all the details. Valuable assistance was given by the other Overseers, Victor Borella '30, Robert E. Kalaidjian '39, James D. Landauer '23, Alex J. McFarland '30, Ambrose Mc- Laughlin '28, Edward S. Miller '3l, Richard Treadway '36, Donald D'Arcy '33 and John Meek '33.
They found that hotelmen throughout the country are turning to the motor-lodge concept as the solution to the problems of the motorized family trade. Parking problems are minimized and the motor lodge is a natural adjunct to the Inn with its dining room, coffee shop, bar and other facilities.
It's some 600 feet from the Hanover Inn to the Motor Lodge but the class is taken there by car after lunch. After greeting carpenters, painters and others of the Trumbull-Nelson crews, you are shown the drive-in registration desk. Guests can register from their cars, get their keys and go straight to their rooms. Bellman service is available, but optional.
From the office-reception area you go to the nearly completed second-floor units and here the professor's lecture brightens. You wipe your feet carefully before stepping out onto the tan (or maybe beige) wall-to-wall carpeting. The walls are an off-white plaster and each room is attractively decorated in one of five basic colors.
The all-male class viewed the decorator colors with proper appreciation and with hard-to-suppress curiosity. Finally one emboldened student ventured the question. Their mentor failed. "I'm only good on the red, blue, green - the common colors. Maybe we could let the guests name them and offer a prize."
Several names — "shocking apricot" . . . "Fiesta puce" . . . "burnt persimmon" among them — were offered, but won no prizes.
The lecture continued on the more familiar ground of fixtures, appointments and hardware.
Each room is equipped with three-station television, is air-conditioned through a central unit that allows individual control in each room, and a double-door connection that permits a suite to be formed of adjoining rooms.
A laminated board partition near the door provides a semiprivate dressing room-closet area. One side has a built-in dressing table and mirror and a wash basin. The other has a long table containing bureau drawers and can also serve as a writing table or as a place for ice bowls and bottled refreshments.
The tiled bathroom is compact and the tub-shower features one of the many ideas contributed by onetime class members. President John Sloan Dickey, who has done more than his share of traveling, suggested that two grab bars and soap trays be built in - one at a shower fan's chest level and another lower down for the tub-user. Many shower aficionados will applaud him.
You move now into the asphalt-tiled hallways. Many motels elsewhere have abandoned interior hallways as a waste of space, but the Motor Lodge designers, with an eye to New England winters, felt that interior entrances were a necessity. Each of the downstairs rooms, however, will have both an indoor and an outdoor entrance.
The lecturer's attention is diverted in the hallway. "Charlie; you're going to have that painting done, aren't you? . . . The weather? . . . Don't worry about it. It will be fine. We've got to get that paint on, though. . . . 0.K., Charlie?"
There are three linen rooms. ("Inns never have enough linen space.") Three ice machines are available and "no one will have to walk more than 40 feet for it."
In the basement the oil heating unit is admired and explained technically. Your notes get a trifle indecipherable here. Suffice to say it seems to be a fine plant.
Back at the reception desk, you learn that coffee will be served to guests in the morning in the Lodge, "but we hope they'll come up to the Inn - just a short walk away - for a full breakfast."
Moving outdoors again you're told that the parking area will be black-topped and that each of the parking spaces will be six inches wider than standard. The management is suspicious of trends in Detroit.
So now you bid the workmen goodbye and leave. You're sure the Motor Lodge will be completed on schedule (April 28), that it will add a first-rate facility to the College scene, and that it fills a real need.
You wonder, though, if it isn't fortunate that, for his nerves' sake, your teacher is an innkeeper primarily and not an inn builder.
"What makes you think we won't be ready to open on schedule April 28?" says Jim McFate, manager of the Hanover Inn, shown in front of the Inn's new motor lodge on Lebanon St.
"Never mind the shape this room's in," says McFate. "Did you ever see a prettier sign?"
