"For Jews"

"Have you no reservation, sir?" It is a stock question in certain "Goyim" (Christian) hotels which discriminate against Jews. The dapper clerk, a trained ethnologist, addresses it to any prospective guest whose name, dress, manners or lineaments might indicate that he is a Jew. U. S. Jews, many of them wealthy, finely educated, have heard this question, turned away from the desk, and had the bellboy carry their bags back to the taxicab.

No, they had no reservations. There are numberless Goyim hotels that will give no reservation to a Bernstein or a Rosenthaler or a Silberblatt, though a Murphy or a Babbitt or a McDribble will be welcomed with the best. But last week a hotel opened its doors in Manhattan where this question, if it is ever asked, will be asked of Christians. It is Libby's hotel, unique of its kind, a $3,000,000 hotel whose slogan is "For Jews."

Libby's stands on Delancey St., a district of pushcarts and lunch-stands and faded, unclosed saloons. Its promoters believe that its magnificence will be enough to change the district, that other hotels for Jews will spring up beside it and bring with them restaurants, theatres, stores, turning back the city's surge to the north. Its stock, some $2,200,000 worth, is held by 25,000 Jews. It derives the name "Libby's" from "Die Liebe," a term of affection which its manager, Max Bernstein, applied to his mother.

Mr. Bernstein himself conducted a party of pressmen and notables on the night of the formal opening. He, a Manhattan Jew whose fine necktie bore witness to his shrewdness, explained that, in order to cater to that sense of Asiatic luxury which is "proper to every good Jew," he had built the hotel around a bath. The Christians who objected to sharing their public quarters with Jews had no such splendid bath as this--no, nor had Augustus Caesar, nor has the most pompous sybarite in Hollywood. The notables, the pressmen inspected the hotel--a steel and concrete Joseph's coat, a terraced temple of fantastic, incredible luxury.

Profiting by the work of such hotel-builders as Boldt, Haan, Sterry, Bauman, Bowman, Muschenheim, Statler, Mr. Bernstein has introduced a magnificence that could be the inspiration only of an able Jew. There are telephones at every turn, express elevators that fly up like harnessed rockets and drop down like oiled meteors. Lounge rooms, gorgeously decorated, allure business-weary limbs with divans and sofas and curving love-chairs; while upstairs, opening upon corridors carpeted with rugs into which feet sink as into perfumed snow, bridal suites and grand suites and supersuites await their imminent occupants with tapestries of many various colors, and furniture beyond the dreams of Park Ave. All these, the gilt dining-rooms clotted with music, the cool oasis of the lobby, and the long line of brilliantly-lighted cages wherein clerks work busily, adding up bills and putting diamonds away in steel lockers, these and the magazine-stall, shingled with bright colors, the crystal glory of the cigar-stand, the drug-annex with its hint of smells still unexplored--are all but promises, all but dramatic fingers pointing upward to that supreme enchantment of all, the bath.

A square of water, as blue as a banner, a liquid panel like a window into star-space, it dreams, moveless, in the white tile floor. Drawn up against walls patterned less purely with tiles of ochre and green and ruby, naked attendants in breech clouts wait to knead and oil the bathers in the hot rooms, steam rooms, medicated rooms, therapeutic rooms beyond.

Private elevators lead up to secret dining rooms where male guests may dine "without formally arraying themselves." This is the apex. All the builders of Babylon could do no more.

There is no great bathroom for women. The wives of guests, whether of those who sleep in the supersuites or the cheap beds in the dormitories, wash themselves in tubs, eat at ordinary tables.

Christians can ask for reservations.