HOTELS: Bowling Alleys & Bellboys’ Ties

The world’s biggest hotel put on the world’s biggest auction sale last week in Chicago. Everything movable (and some choice stationary items) in the 3,000-room Stevens Hotel went on the block. The Stevens, now the home of some 9,000 U.S. Army Air Forces students, cost its builders $28,000,000 in 1927, was sold to the Army for only $6,000,000 last December. Proceeds of the auction of its furnishings, which were last valued at $2,200,000, will apply against the Army’s purchase price.

There were 6,600 different items in the auction, some of them in lots of more than 5,000. To Chicagoans, auctioneering Samuel L. Winternitz & Co.’s 995-page inventory brought nostalgic reminders of the hotel’s heyday in the ’20s. To the buyers who flocked into auction headquarters in the 21-story Electric Garage, the lots were mouth-watering reminders of the days before rationing and stop-production orders. Items :

>10,000 dozen knives, forks and spoons, 200,000 dishes, 150,000 glasses and goblets, 1,000 18-carat gold-plated banquet plates (all just a headache to soldiers on K.P. duty who had been put to polishing them for the sale).

> Enough beds and innerspring mattresses to sleep 8,000 people, enough chairs, davenports and love seats to seat perhaps 10,000.

> A $100,000 stainless steel kitchen, hundreds of copper and aluminum pots & pans, 2,000 Seltzer bottles.

> Five completely equipped bowling alleys, one 60-foot oak bar, 15 portable bars, 25 buffets.

Customers went after 8,500 yards of brand-new carpeting, 27,500 yards of used carpet and padding and four museum-piece Orientals (one, a 200-year-old Sarouk, originally cost $32,000). There was all the flotsam & jetsam of a huge hotel: used umbrellas, 750 pairs of doormen’s gloves, 742 cuspidors, red ties for bellboys (and electric tie pressers), wheelchairs and cribs, the flags of all nations, an elephant tusk. And there was Lot #3835: the stuffed head of Lucky Boy II, 4-H champion steer of 1941, which a Wilmette woodworker snapped up for $25 (he also paid $12,250 for the 14 ornate chandeliers).

The 400-odd customers from over 35 states (each posted $50 for the privilege of bidding) found other evidences of wartime living besides the soldiers who acted as guides and elevator men. The OPA was there in force to see that ceiling prices were strictly observed and to warn buyers against any resale shenanigans.

At week’s end the sale was still at such a fever point that the Army refused to guess how much less than $6,000,000 the Stevens would finally cost.