I've been working on and off for 10 years on a hotel database which now contains almost 25,000 entries and I'm now able to offer it for sale for the first time.  Many people have asked me over the years:  Where did the idea for a database of information on American Hotels come from?

...Maybe it was the summer job during college working in a small summer hotel in Cape May, NJ, a resort city filled with Victorian and early 20th century hotels?

...Maybe it was an interest I developed in early American architecture?

...Maybe it was searching for props to use in a series of window displays I designed around a "railroad" theme, where I discovered that railroad dining cars had custom-designed china patterns?

...Maybe it was the desire to start collecting as many of these railroad china patterns as possible that lead me to flea markets and antique shops?

It definitely was all of the crested pieces of hotel china I kept finding at prices much more affordable than the railroad crested china.  Beautiful crests, but what and where was the hotel they had been made for?

What started out as a simple gathering of information on 3"x5" index cards about older hotels kept growing and growing.  Once I got an eMac™ computer I started using the database program to transfer the information from the index cards.  The purchase of a 1927 Hotel Red Book, followed by some 1970's Red Books at a library sale, began a search for more issues of the Hotel Red Books to fill in the missing years.  It soon became apparent that the built-in eMac™ database was not going to be able to deal with all the information being fed into it.  At my daughter's suggestion, I invested in the Filemaker Pro™ software program and the number of hotels in the database kept growing and growing.

Originally the plan was to include only hotels with 100 rooms or more.  Now using 40 different Hotel Red Books and about 270 other reference books and magazines, the information continues to grow.

At present I am going page by page, state by state, town by town through a 1904 Hotel Red Book, the earliest in the collection, adding information on every "First Class" hotel listed, regardless of size.

What started as an attempt to find information of maybe 5,000 hotels has grown to include information on over 20,000 American hotels which operated prior to the start of the 21st century.  This is a search that will never result in a complete listing but hopefully will record much about the hotel industry in America.

                                                                                         Larry Paul