The Nostalgic Traveler: Hotel Normandie

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Photo by Susan Harlan.

Part One: A Sunken Ship

In 1942, the SS Normandie ocean liner caught fire in the Hudson River and capsized at Pier 88. She sank into the mud. She had been seized by U.S. authorities during the war and renamed the USS Lafayette, so she was not the SS Normandie anymore when she sank. Although she was salvaged, she was too expensive to restore, and so she was thrown away.

When I was in Puerto Rico at a conference last fall, I came across a ruined hotel that was modeled on this ship. This is what I’m thinking about as I walk out on the dock at Chelsea Piers – the one you aren’t supposed to go onto unless you have a boat moored there. I don’t have a boat, but I sit down on a bench and feel the Hudson rise and fall beneath me. I’m about twenty blocks south of where the ship sank.

I listen to men wheel carts of catered food in and out of buildings, and I watch swallows dip their little bodies down towards the water and then right themselves and fly back up, darting through the sailboats’ masts. The SS Normandie made over a hundred transatlantic crossings from Le Havre to New York City before she died in the Hudson. But the Hudson is the sea, too. It is part sea. I remember learning this a long time ago: that it’s not really a river at all – it’s a tidal estuary, its waters brackish, its character bound up in the ocean beyond.

The hotel in San Juan that was inspired by this ship opened on October 10, 1942, the same year that the real ship sank. It was called the Hotel Normandie. Now it is a ruin, but not an important ruin like a Greek temple or the statue of a Roman god. It’s a ruin that no one visits. So I decided to visit it.

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But I didn’t go right away. I sat on a chaise lounge at my resort – the Hilton Caribe next door – and watched the white cruise ships and the gray warships idle along the horizon. I watched kids play in the sand. And I reread The Odyssey. For Homer, the sea divides the present from the past and the future, and it can be stretched out by sheer human will that longs for home but defers it, lengthening the distance between here and there. Between now and then. I thought about being always at sea.

Conferences are always strange, but they are particularly strange when they’re at a tropical resort. Most of the conference attendees don’t fit into the environment. They seem to hover on the surface, as if they’ve been cut out of one picture and superimposed on another. In part, this has to do with clothing. People at a resort are dressed in bathing suits. Floppy hats. They tote around straw bags and colorful towels. The women are in sarongs; the men, shirts printed with macaws. These people are on vacation. These people do not wear socks.

And then: us. The conference people. We were all wearing name badges. We were dressed in professional clothing – mostly suits made of fabrics unsuited to a tropical climate. Light gray wool that does not breathe. We walked around aimlessly, waiting for the next panel of talks to start, fanning ourselves with our conference programs. Some of us wore socks.

We were all Renaissance scholars, and we had come to the sea to listen to papers about Shakespeare, and courtiers’ portraits, and lost manuscripts that had been found, and other such things. We were the dissonant elements, but we took the place over. The Hilton was at maximum capacity, and everyone who was not one of us looked at us, and at our name badges, with a mixture of curiosity and pity and then went about their day.

In the hotel lobby were two parrots in a cage. These creatures welcomed you to your tropical paradise, but if you walked too close to their cage, they let out terrifying sounds, their little beak-mouths wide open, their leathery tongues on display. Colorful little dinosaurs that would like to kill you, if they hadn’t devolved. These birds made me depressed, so I tried not to walk past them.

But a resort is a cage, too – it’s just a very nice one with glossy marble surfaces and manicured grounds. Most of my resort experience dates back to before I went to college, when my mom and sisters would accompany my dad to his medical conferences in tropical locations. These conventions were always held at resorts with lobbies that were half-gardens and opened onto the outside world, and the air smelled of sweet meaty flowers. In Maui, we were all given leis when we arrived, beautiful objects that were taken out of clear plastic boxes and then sprayed with water by the concierge.

My dad went to meetings and talks all day, and we sat on the beach. Every day, my sisters and I went to the hotel bar and ordered virgin pina coladas and charged them to my parents’ room. We roamed about the resort. We imagined ourselves free. We felt this way because a resort is a place apart. We were utterly contained, our boundaries mapped out by palm trees whose dead fronds were carted away the instant they fell. In the evenings, there were parties with pigs on spits. At one resort in Hawaii, I could see the black lava fields off in the distance, but the resort was lush and green. A manufactured oasis for maximum relaxation.

And here I was at the Hilton Caribe, another oasis, and I didn’t even have to order virgin pina coladas anymore. Like the resorts I knew as a kid, it was a place of rest. Odysseus himself might have enjoyed resting here, wrapped in a fluffy duvet, bored and shore-bound, as Tennyson imagined him. The Hilton made nominal gestures towards “activities.” By the pool was a posted sign that outlined some of these options. The sign seemed unchanged since 1949, when the hotel opened:

BEACH AREA: AQUATIC AEROBICS
POOL AREA: “PINA COLADA” TASTING
POOL BAR: ANIMAL SEARCH
GREEN AREA: BINGO GAME
BEACH AREA: LATIN DANCE LESSONS

I didn’t know why “PINA COLADA” was in quotes, or what an animal search involved, or what defined a green area. There were lots of green areas. In the evenings, I stood on my balcony and surveyed the landscape below. Not a tree except where a tree should be, not a flower out of place. The location of each element was plotted and planned precisely so that all of these manifestations of the natural, divorced from the natural, might give a sense of the natural. There was a sign outside that requested: Do Not Feed the Swans in Their Natural Habitat.

And next door to this natural habitat was a ruin. I had noticed the abandoned and decaying Hotel Normandie in my cab on the way to the Hilton. It looked sad and sublime. And so, when I was feeling restless from my mandated relaxation and uninspired about attending academic talks, I walked over to take a look.

It was like an interruption in time. It was ravaged: the front doors boarded up, the windows broken. Shredded police tape and orange construction cones warned me to stay out, and the ground was covered in trash. But I could see that it was once a marvel. The 97,000-square foot building with 173 guest rooms was the result of four years of construction and a two million dollar investment. It was designed by the architect-engineer F. Benitez-Rexach, along with another fellow named Raul Reichard.

And it was designed to look like an ocean liner – like the SS Normandie that went down in the Hudson. The entrance to the hotel is narrow like the bow of a ship and rounded, and then the building widens out into a kind of triangle. The rows of windows create the sense of decks, but the ship’s name is not written on its hull. The name – NORMANDIE in block letters – hovers above on a scaffold. The hotel is a ship that has lost its way and run aground. A ship that points towards land.

Rexach loved ocean liners because at the time they were the height of sophistication and because he had met his French wife while aboard the SS Normandie. He devised the hotel as an homage to her: a tropical Taj Mahal for the quick, not the dead. He imagined a place of luxury and opulence that would mimic the experience of being at sea. I have a check from December 31, 1943, about a year after the hotel opened. It is made out to Modesto Bird in the amount of $797.90, which is about $11,000.00 today. In the notes section to the left, Rexach has written the words Payroll and Semanal, and then, in the lower right-hand corner, on the line, his signature: F. Benitez-Rexach. Modesto Bird cashed the check on the same day: PAID 123143 BPPR is stamped in holes on the document, and his own signature is on the back. It is check number 811 that Rexach wrote. I wonder what the purchase was for, and what the 810 purchases before were for. Rexach also worked in the Dominican Republic, and he was friends with Trujillo.

Friends with Trujillo. A shadowy history, the history of this abandoned place.

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Part Two: A Ship on Land

Although the Hotel Normandie has been abandoned for less a decade, its decay occurred rapidly. It’s strange to think of a place becoming a ruin in a hurry, but it did. The hotel was bought for $39.5 million in 2006, only to close three years later. Oddly, it still shows up on some travel sites as open, and you can see pictures of the rooms in their most recent incarnations. In 1980, it was declared a National Historic Site. It has now been sold to the Houston-based Interra Capital Group. Maybe it will be remodeled. Maybe. But it will never be like it was originally.

When a hotel closes, you have to get rid of so much stuff. Walking through the puddles and garbage outside, I thought of all that furniture from the forties (and then all that furniture from the nineties): probably the same furniture for almost two hundred rooms. Two hundred of the same chairs. Two hundred of the same headboards. All the paintings on the walls. The champagne glasses. The ashtrays. All lost now. What is a hotel without guests, without stuff? Just a paint-peeled shell looking out to sea.

The gates on both sides of the hotel were locked with big padlocks. Things were growing beyond where things are supposed to grow at a resort. I wondered why people came to this strange ship of a hotel in 1942. Would they have preferred a real ocean liner? Maybe they disliked being tossed about by waves. Maybe they wanted a waveless trip on a vessel that would never set sail.

Maybe this was the appeal. I live in one of the old tobacco capitals of the South, where the would-be ancestral estate of the Reynolds family is located. In the 1930s, when things were not going terribly well for much of the country, the family added a sleek and glamorous bar to their mansion that was inspired by a bar on an ocean liner. One of the adult daughters had taken a cruise to Europe and had been charmed by the experience. So this bar has porthole windows and sleek red banquettes. Little cocktail tables bolted to the floor. To reproduce a ship at your inland North Carolina mansion is an undertaking both absurd and inspired: the sort of thing only the very rich would attempt. The sea is so far. The sea is elsewhere. But that is no matter; we will bring the sea here.

I wanted to go inside the Hotel Normandie, but I knew I couldn’t. I thought that inside it must be a cipher, gathering together all sorts of traces of the past. Things that are broken. I know what the outside used to look like from a postcard that’s marked with the brown mold of age. Hotels so rarely have their own postcards anymore, but in this one, you can see the parking lot and the cars in neat rows, and the tress and lamp posts: these things all insist on the hotel’s land-ness. On the back, the Hotel Normandie declares itself the “Pride of Puerto Rico.” The card also reminds you that there is a “Center of Convenience, Beach and Swimming Pool Facilities, Special rates for Tours, Conventions, Groups, Schools, and Clubs.” A phone number is listed: 723-1900. The area code for San Juan is 787. I called it, and it just rang and rang.

When I was in high school, my sisters and I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) about a million times. Part of the film takes place on an ocean liner that transports two friends, the sensible and brunette Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) and the flighty, blonde gold-digger Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe), from New York to a fantastical version of Paris. Like The Lady Eve (1941), the movie is about being at sea, conning people, drinking, and falling in love, and when Dorothy and Lorelei set off, high jinx ensue.

It’s a world of play – the kind of world the Hotel Normandie sought to emulate, where desire is generated and satisfied. You eat, drink, smoke. You are merry. I imagine people filling the bars and restaurants of the hotel, all of them in full evening dress. Talking. Dancing. This is what Lorelei and Dorothy do on the open ocean. Dorothy just wants a bit of fun, but Lorelei insists that she commit herself to serious husband-hunting. And there are lots of men about. As the ship pulls away from shore, virtually everyone joins in the song “Remember You’re My Baby,” an upbeat infidelity anthem that pleads, Although I know that you care, won’t you write and declare that though on the loose, you are still on the square? There is nothing to do on this ship other than get into trouble. There was probably very little to do at the Hotel Normandie other than get into trouble.

During the afternoons, Dorothy walks along the deck, chatting and flirting. And behind her, the ocean stretches out on a Hollywood screen: an ersatz ocean, a film of a film.

To be at sea is to be elsewhere, but the Hotel Normandie wanted to bring the sea here. And oddly for the people who stayed there, the sea was right there, just beyond the hotel’s walls, so maybe the guests in their glittering clothes could almost feel the water beneath them. Maybe if a lady looked out the right window, she wouldn’t see the land. Or maybe if she had a few cocktails, it wouldn’t matter anymore: she could ignore the parked cars and the trees and imagine she was on a voyage like Dorothy and Lorelei, adrift and free from the abiding shore.

 

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