of Johns Hopkins University, the Belvedere has hosted some prestigious intellectual guests. The poet Marianne Moore arrived in Baltimore on a summer afternoon in June 1960. “Never felt such oven heat as in the taxi to the Belvedere,” she wrote to a friend. “I had waited in the sun but the hotel is very cool even with no air conditioner, which I turned off immediately. A better hotel than the Ritz in this respect; the coat hangers are not locked to the rod and the bathroom would satisfy Nero—either scented or unscented soap—huge towel racks peopled with bath towels—and on another wall, linen—well it is crucial.” Staying with Moore at the hotel were Margaret Mead and Hannah Arendt; the three women had come to receive honorary degrees from Johns Hopkins. (Afterward, Arendt described it as “an idiotic affair,” calling Moore “an angel” and Mead “a monster.”)
Magazine advertisement for the Belvedere Hotel, 1936
Six years later, over the weekend of October 18–21, 1966, Johns Hopkins again relied on the Belvedere to accommodate various academic luminaries, this time those attending the inaugural conference of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center. Guests at the hotel that weekend included Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, who, at age thirty-six, was just beginning to make a name for himself.
Upon his arrival at the Belvedere, then, Derrida was surprised to learn that the charismatic and far more famous Lacan had already taken the liberty of requesting a deluxe room for the younger man. Over a buffet dinner in the hotel restaurant that evening, the two Frenchmen finally got the chance to discuss their ideas, but quickly found themselves at odds. Their argument remained unresolved. Lacan, who still had not written his conference paper, went to bed, then got up very early and wrote as he sat at his window watching dawn break over the city. Those who attended the conference recalled that, while all the other speakers spoke in elegant French and relied on the talented translators provided by the university, Lacan insisted on using his terrible English.
“When I prepared this little talk for you, it was early in the morning,” the eccentric Frenchman began. “I could see Baltimore through the window, and it was a very interesting moment because it was not quite daylight, and a neon sign indicated to me every minute the change of time, and naturally there was heavy traffic.” He then declared, in a startling and bizarre insight, that “the best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.”
This gathering of luminaries provided a last moment of glory for the hotel; in 1968, Sheraton sold it to Gotham Hotels, Inc., which in turn leased it to a shady corporation that rented it out, in September 1971, as a dormitory for students at all the colleges and universities in Baltimore.
It was a stroke of genius that became a nightmare. Each university that sent students to the Belvedere assumed that the company would provide appropriate supervision for the hundreds of young men and women living in the old hotel, many of whom had arrived from small towns and were away from home for the first time. Their parents, who may have stayed at the hotel ten or fifteen years earlier, no doubt imagined their sons and daughters sipping tea in the John Eager Howard Room. But the truth could hardly have been more different.
It was the tail end of the 1960s, and the hotel dorms were coed and unregulated. There were all kinds of drugs and plenty of sex. Every weekend, all-night parties took place in the ballrooms, at which drag queens would mix with locals who had walked in off the street in hopes of picking up a shy young student. These festivities would attract local underground celebrities like the movie star Divine, as well as street hustlers and drug dealers who came to prey on fresh meat.
Those who lived through the four-month experiment all remember their majestic dorm rooms, the chandeliers, and the fancy furniture (although the meals, served in a cafeteria in the basement, were anything but fancy). The atmosphere was recalled as being pleasantly communal during the day, but it could get threatening at night. On the eighth floor, shy art students from the nearby Maryland Institute lived in uneasy harmony with the Morgan State University football team—a group of burly guys with little interest in abstract painting. The only supervisor anyone can remember seeing was a creepy guy with an artificial leg who was always hanging around at the parties, trying to pick up girls.
By the time the first semester was drawing to a close, things had started to get seriously out of hand. Fights broke out in the hallways. Two rapes were reported. The trash went uncollected. Police raids became regular events. By January 1972, the city had announced that the building would be closed because of extensive code violations, and everyone had to get out. Some of the students, angry at their sudden eviction, retaliated with vandalism, destroying their rooms and the hallways; others took along a few fancy lamps and end tables with them when they moved, mementos of the hotel’s former majesty.
Today, the Belvedere is a condominium complex. We live in an apartment that was originally two hotel suites, 501 and 502. The moment I laid eyes on the space, I fell in love with its shabby grandeur, the Swarovski chandeliers, the bare concrete floor, and the peeling paint. We’ve lived here for over ten years now, and our love is still strong. But as we soon discovered, there are drawbacks to living in a building constructed over a hundred years ago and designed as a hotel. The original kitchens are tiny, the windows almost impossible to clean; the air-conditioning system leaks, and until they were recently replaced, the elevators would regularly break down.
Thanks to its location and lack of outdoor space, the Belvedere is a quiet building, unsuited for families. Most of its inhabitants are older single people. Hardworking, quiet medical students at Johns Hopkins rent a number of the one-bedroom units, and there are a few older couples, like the two elderly ladies on our floor whom we see only on Sundays, when, dressed in matching wigs and hats, they make their way shakily to church. The grand ballrooms are owned by an events company, Belvedere & Co., which rents them out for weddings, rehearsal dinners, and other social functions. Enter the lobby through the revolving doors and you can still sense the old grandeur, but go upstairs to the residential floors and you will notice the carpets are worn, the light fixtures coated in dust.
In 1912, the Washington Post reported that an “Esthetic Nobleman” named Count August Seymore had planned to construct a “hotel for suicides” in the nation’s capital. This building, according to the count, would be a “haven for the depressed and weary of life.” Once the disillusioned guest had checked into his “eternal rest room,” taken the complimentary sedative, and pressed a bedside button to indicate his readiness, the desk clerk would discreetly turn on a gas tap in his room (thereby ensuring none of the furniture or carpets will be “spoiled by grewsome gore”). A crematorium on the roof would assist in disposing of the guests’ bodies, its furnace providing the hotel with a cheap and handy source of power.
Unsurprisingly, this imaginative scheme came to nothing, and the next time Count Seymore appeared in the newspapers, he was spending an hour a day in the window of a department store in Pittsburgh “demonstrating the correct method of wearing clothes.” Within a year he had moved on to a new obsession—the reanimation of the dead. Yet the count’s “suicide hotel” does make a certain kind of sense, if only in its acknowledgment of the fact that it’s much easier for people who want to commit suicide to do so in a private place away from home. And what place could be more private than a hotel?
This conceit forms the basis of The Suicide Club, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1878 trilogy of short stories involving a secret society for those who “have grown heartily sick of the performance in which they are expected to join daily and all their lives long.” As one of the society’s members explains, “We have affairs in different places; and hence railways were invented. Railways separated us infallibly from our friends; and so telegraphs were made that we might communicate speedier at great distances. Even in hotels we have lifts to spare us a climb of some hundred steps.” The ultimate convenience—a key to “Death’s private door”—is provided to all members of the Suicide Club.
Outside of fiction, those seeking a key to “Death’s private door” will often register, with brave equanimity, at a hotel. There are various reasons for this, some emotional and others practical, but, to put it bluntly, at