A Description of the Tremont House

Description

When the Tremont House opened in 1829 it did things no building had done before: a private room with a lock for every guest, free soap, indoor plumbing, a front desk, bellboys. Contemporaries did not have a word for it, so they invented one — the hotel. This volume, published the year after the opening, is the record its own architects left: Isaiah Rogers’s plans, sections and elevations, engraved as thirty-one plates, together with a description of the arrangements that made the building famous across the Atlantic. It is at once a founding document of American architecture and the first specification of a building type now found in every city on earth. The Tremont was demolished in 1895; these plates are what survives of it.