The Failure of Entrepreneurial Extravagance

The descriptions of actual hotels in New York City during this time period reveal how easy it was to get caught up in the progressive period. The era was so expansive that it was deceivingly limitless. Martin unfortunately took his ability to integrate systems to a fantastic level culminating in failure. His ideas became too complex and too detached from the traditional ways that he knew were necessary to attract customers. In this progressive period when there was a blank canvas to keep making combinations, there was nothing stopping Martin from getting carried away in arranging the unarrangeable into something that was incomprehensible. His dreams had no boundary in a city that was growing in every direction and combining every business and service to conveniently please residents:

Was there something wrong with him, that he couldn’t just rest content? Must he always be dreaming up improvements? And it seemed to Martin that if only he could imagine something else, something great, something greater, something as great as the whole world, then he might rest a while. (242-243)

Inspired by this expansive time, Martin had no control of his dream going too far beyond the limits of human capacity.

When Martin created The Grand Cosmo, he took the natural concept that he New York City hoteliers previously incorporated in their hotels to a fantastic level. Martin described some of the Grand Cosmo’s natural features: “the many parks and ponds and gardens including the Pleasure Park with its artificial moonlight checkering the paths…the haunted grotto, in which ghosts floated out from behind shadowy stalactites and fluttered toward visitors in a darkness illuminated by lanternlight” (267). Martin created indoor parks, gardens and grottos and incorporated ghosts wandering around the hotel, but these features were confusing to residents. They wanted a natural aspect to escape to, but the integration of ghosts, and natural features being made artificial was too different for them.

Even Martin recognized this as his failure: “Martin… noted that fewer than half the spaces had been rented, but he was certain this failure was due to the strangeness of the Grand Cosmo: people didn’t know exactly what it was” (264). This uncertainty was dangerous in running a business. If people did not understand Martin’s new system, they had a reason to not even give it a chance. Alicita Rodriguez explains the outcome of confusing the natural and artificial roles:

The building itself rejects the import of conditioned air as if it were as unnatural as a respirator. Since the building has become a natural space, it requires natural air. All of these contained, orchestrated spaces eliminate the sense that people step inside from outside. Without a boundary, it is impossible to determine where you are going and where you have been.

Rogriguez argued that Martin’s natural building “destroys history as a progression”, but more importantly it contradicted what Martin was trying to do in the first place. He wanted people to escape from the city in his hotel, however, residents could not determine where the city ended and The Grand Cosmo began.

Martin thought that to be successful he had to keep integrating new combinations. He explained his perspective to Emmeline, “For if the New Dressler was transitional, it wasn’t,…because he had strayed from the purity of a traditional apartment hotel, but rather because he hadn’t strayed far enough” (240-241). However, his ambition to keep creating something more exotic, something more complexly integrated, pushed him further into an unknown world that was not appealing but rather confusing. Staying at the Grand Cosmo, residents did not know where they were or why the combination of idealistic features existed together, and they were therefore turned off all together to stay there: “Martin himself had been stung solely by the charge that the Grand Cosmo was uninhabitable” (277).

The Grand Cosmo combined too many surreal and unknown features to be an accepted living place. What started as providing convenience and integrating old and new features culminated in a dreamlike combination of every possible creature, structure, and natural element in the world. Martin became greedy in a time where everything seemed unlimited. He was deceived by the extravagance of the Gilded Age and he created a system that lost sight of the boundaries of human condition.