Des Moines newspapers were full of the glory of their city. “Enterprise, confidence, civic pride are what make the citizenship of our city!” “Des Moines is ever going forward!” are sentences we read. “Nothing the matter with Des Moines!” was the title of a leader in one of them. What was the matter with Des Moines, we wondered. The article did not tell us. It only said: “With our new thirteen-story building and the new gilded dome of the Capitol, Des Moines towers above the other cities of the State like a lone cottonwood on the prairie.”
However, levity aside, when Des Moines has completed the parkway in front of the Capitol, and built up all of the embankment like the stretch that is already finished, the city with its civic center will be one of the most beautiful and perfect in the world. Already a community of beautiful buildings and houses, some day Des Moines will probably put up a last word in hotels. Maybe Des Moines, being a city of homes, doesn’t care about hotels!
Don’t think from this that the Chamberlain is poor! It is a perfectly comfortable and well-run hotel, but not truly representative of this fine city.
In a little hotel the other day a waitress rushed out of the dining-room and shouted to the clerk behind the desk at which I was standing:
“Say, have you seen Charlie?”
“Who wants him?”
“Miss Higgins.”
“Excuse me a minute,” said the clerk, as he went to look for Charlie, the proprietor, for Miss Higgins, the waitress!
Most of the hotels so far have been comfortable and nearly all clean. One of the exceptions has a story, and because of the story I cannot bear to tell its name. “A new house,” the clerk we left in the morning told us, “doing a big business. Yes, you had better telegraph ahead for rooms.”
Escorted by negro bellboys we entered a terra cotta and green lobby, the walls and ceilings of which protuberated with green and orange and brown and iron and gold and plaster, and all smudged with many wipings in of soot.