was known as “the new annex.” This building, more simple in design than the others, was constructed of basal stone of the rough, porous, light-hued kind which was predominant in many of the new architectures throughout the nation. The building, neat, compact, and for the most part unadorned by useless ornament, somehow gave the effect of having been stamped out, with a million others of its kind, by a gigantic biscuit-cutter of such buildings—and hence to speak, how or in what way it was hard to say, yet instantly apparent, the mechanic spirit of a “newer” or more “modern” scheme—the scheme of “the’twenties,” of 1922 or 1924.
It was hard to know why one found fault with the building, but somehow it left one without joy. In many obvious ways this would be apparent at once, not only to the architect, but to the layman—it was superior to its companion structures. Although not a building which combined simple grace with use—as the old colonial structures of New England do—it was at least a building lacking in the clumsy and meaningless adornment which disfigured the surface of its two companions. Moreover, the rough, porous-looking brick had a look of lean and homely integrity: it was hard to know why one disliked the building, and yet one did—the other two, with all their confusing and unreasoning decoration, were the warmer, better, and more cheerful places.
What was it? It was almost impossible to define the quality of “the new annex” or its depressing effect upon the spectator, yet its quality was unmistakable. It belonged somehow to a new and accursed substance which had come into the structure of life—a substance barren, sterile, and inhuman—designed not for the use of man, but for the blind proliferations of the man-swarm to accommodate the greatest number in the smallest space—to shelter, house, turn out, take in, all the nameless, faceless, mindless man-swarm atoms of the earth.
The transient population of the Leopold, comparatively, was small. The great tidal fluctuation of brief visitors—business men, salesmen, newly wedded couples on their honeymoons, people from small towns out for a spree or a week or two of bright-light gaiety—which swarmed in unceasing movements in and out of the city, had scarcely touched the life of the Leopold. The hotel, set in a quarter of the city that was a little remote from the great business and pleasure districts, depended largely for its custom on the patronage of a “permanent” clientele. It was, in short, the kind of place often referred to as “a quiet family hotel”—a phrase which the management of the Leopold made use of in advertising the merits of their establishment,
