Saturday's Passage of the Week

In my upcoming book, Service IS The Business (working title) I share a behind-the-desk perspective of what it is like to work at a real San Francisco hotel concierge desk.

Enjoy this brief segment from the third chapter.

The Franklyn was built in 1927 and carried with it remnants of its flapper past.  The moldings had a somewhat worn Art Deco charm, but the décor was not grandiose like traditional hotel designs of that era.  There was a circular iron plug in the floor in the lobby which was covered by one of the carpets.  It normally went unnoticed. I discovered it was a portal, through which alcohol was secretly transported from the basement into a speakeasy in the lobby during prohibition.  Naturally the speakeasy was not there anymore, but the iron cover and the history remain.

I interviewed with Thelma, and then met Dominic, the general manager.  He had a booming voice, was six foot four and weighed 250 pounds.  And he had earned his stripes.  His parents worked in the Catskills resorts in upstate New York, and he grew up around the business.  By the time he was in his mid-30s, and when I first met him, he had been the general manager of the Franklyn Hotel for many years.  

He was one of those guys who would assess you for your weaknesses upon first introduction, but he knew his business backwards and forwards, and I respected him for that.  He kept his interview short and to the point: Don’t be late, don’t lie to him, if it’s slow find something to do as there is always some work to be done. “I’m not paying you to stand around,” he exclaimed.  That was it.  With that I was hired.  This was the spring of 1989.  George H. W. Bush had just begun as the new US president, and although I did not know it at the time, I was embarking on a new career in the hospitality business.

The Franklyn had been an old residence hotel, what they would today call an SRO (single room occupancy).  It was like an apartment building which had pretty much been converted to accept nightly rentals, like a traditional hotel.  However, the management still had to accommodate residents who called this hotel home at the time of the transition.  Basically, tenants lived in a hotel room, and got their meals outside the building.

When I started, it was at the tail end of a law that stipulated any hotel which wanted to accept regular guests still had to accommodate its resident-tenants until they moved out.  Only then could their room be converted into a standard hotel room.

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