I’m back from the APTI conference in Providence – as always, informative and fun – and I have two photos that tell you everything you need to know I think is important about my hotel. It’s the Graduate Hotel, which was known for most of its existence, since opening in 1922, as the Biltmore. It is quite large and at a prominent location in downtown Providence, but physically it’s a pretty normal 1920s steel-frame, brick-curtain-wall, concrete-slab structure. It’s 18 stories and 220 feet, which makes it tall for its home city, even today.
First picture, the ceiling of my room:
A girder on each side, and filler beams spaced at a maximum of 7 feet. Absolutely standard. The architects were Warren & Wetmore, who were in new York, so it’s a pretty good bet that the structural engineering was performed in new York as well, making the similarity between this and the 1920s buildings I see all the time even less of a coincidence. Any way, the structure is doing its job exactly the way it has for the last 103 years.
(In case you’re peering closely at the thing over the window, there’s a wood fascia covering the curtain rods, and knots in the wood are showing through the white paint. Your guess as to whether that was intentional is as good as mine.)
A hotel in 1922 with private bathrooms for each room, as this one had, would have plumbing fairly similar to, or maybe identical to, a modern building. Wiring is a different issue. There would have been some a few convenience outlets – almost certainly fewer than are now required by code – and some ceiling light fixtures. And that’s it. No low-voltage wiring for networking or fire alarms, no cable TV, not enough outlets. Which leads to the second photo, the ceiling of the closet in my room, where things changed in a way that the basic structure did not:
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