Hotel Pasaje, Havana

The Hotel Pasaje was located on Paseo del Prado between San José and Dragones, facing the National Capitol.

Hotel Pasaje
General information
TypeCommercial
Architectural styleNeo classic
Town or cityHavana
CountryCuba
Coordinates23.135962°N 82.358382°W / 23.135962; -82.358382
Completed1876
Demolished1980s
OwnerZequeria y Zequeria family
Technical details
Floor count3
Lifts/elevators1

History

Before the Havana walls were torn down, a partial map shows the site of the Villanueva railway the site of the National Capitol and the site of the Pasaje hotel before the plots were subdivided.

Partial map of Havana showing the Villanueva railway station and the Paseo de Isabel before the Capitol and Hotel Pasaje were built.
Fragmento-del-Plano-de-La-Habana-de-1900-de-Esteban-Pichardo, Havana, Cuba
Hotel Pasaje in front of Paseo de Isabel

The Hotel Pasaje was the oldest in the Las Murallas neighborhood. Located in block No. 14 of said urbanization, it was part of the construction of the area in the 1870s. Mr. Pedro Gutiérrez Castillo was the first private owner of all these plots, on October 9, 1874, he bought, for 250,000 pesetas, plots No. 6 and 7: Lot No. 6 located towards Prado Street and No. 7 towards Zulueta. Later, in that same year, it also acquired plots Nos. 4 and 5 of this block. Each of the portions measured 670 m. Villanueva Station and Campo de Marte in the early years of the 20th century. In the background, the buildings erected on the sites mentioned Villanueva Station and Campo de Marte in the early years of the 20th century. In the background, the buildings erected on the sites mentioned Despite the meticulous layout of the grounds, the hotel did not emerge as a single building but was the result of the addition of several farms and the incorporation of an existing passage in the block from earlier times. Added to this are the purchase and sale actions of said lots and the changes of owners. Thus, Emilio Reyling and Arcadio Sequeira are the ones who begin to manufacture independent buildings, but with some common uses and linked to the passage. Essential for the study of Las Murallas is the work of the historian Carlos Venegas Fornias The urbanization of the walls: dependency and modernity (1990), and for the Hotel Pasaje, the (unpublished) research by Patricia Andino Díaz Historical Study Sala Polivalente Kid Chocolate, former Hotel Pasaje (2015). In this last work, the previous presence of this opening in the block is revealed, when many might think that the hotel was built from the beginning with the same concept of commercial galleries crossing a block and that at the time they were very fashionable in Europe. . Andino similarly exposes the existence, in the National Archives of Cuba, of Book 99 of the Old Mortgage Registry, where it is detailed that lot No. 4 of block 14 was "crossed by the urban railway track whose translation is agreed to Central Street”, that is, Zulueta Street.[1] Built in 1871, the Hotel Passage was the first building to be built in Cuba dedicated to the hotel industry.[lower-alpha 1] Up to that time, the usual thing was to adapt the existing buildings for this function.

Galería-hotel-Pasaje-siglo-XIX, Havana, Cuba

The name of the Hotel Pasajere received its name from the gallery that crossed the site of the building from the Prado to Calle Zulueta. The ceiling of this gallery was covered with glass, which facilitated the lighting of the commercial establishments that were established on both sides, The gallery made the hotel a popular place for Havanans of the time.

Nationalization

By the late 1950s, the Hotel Pasajet was still considered a fine hotel, however, it was no longer the exclusive establishment of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[lower-alpha 2] From the 1920s until the end of the Republic, its clientele was made up of business travelers, budget-conscious visitors, and some families who rented rooms for long periods of time. However, the management managed to survive all the tourism crises in Cuba and the Pasaje hotel continued to offer services uninterruptedly until its nationalization by the Cuban government after the triumph of the 1959 Revolution.[4]

The front of the Hotel Passage faced the Paseo del Prado; the rear went to Calle Zulueta, between the aforementioned roads and with access to both streets, ran a gallery or passage covered with an iron and glass structure and that accommodated several commercial and service establishments, among these are the publishing house “Flérida Galante”, of pornographic books. This passage gave the hotel its name. A few meters from the Central Park and next to the Payret theater, became one of the most representative urban places in Havana.[3]

  • Hotel Pasaje, Havana, Cuba
  • Hotel Pasaje on Paseo de Isabel, Havana, Cuba
  • DAILY DINNER MENU, EL PASAJE HOTEL
  • Paseo Isabel and Hotel Pasaje, Havana, Cuba.

See also

Notes
  1. "In March 1889, John and Frances Glessner, accompanied by their daughter Fanny and her maid Emma, embarked on a month long journey encompassing several locations in Florida and Cuba, with additional stops at Jekyll Island, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Washington, D.C. They travelled to Havana March 8 and 9 aboard the steamer Capt. J. McKey Olivette, boarding at Port Tampa with a brief stop at Key West, Florida; these are excerpts from Frances Glessner’s journal recounting their arrival and first day in Havana. In Havana we stayed at the Hotel Pasaje, meaning passage or arcade and our hotel takes its name from the arcade that runs through it. An interpreter was out from the Hotel Pasaje – John Repko – a Hungarian who lives during the summer in New York City. The hotel was several blocks from the landing. We went up in coaches – like a Victoria with two or four seats drawn by one miserable little tough mustang horse and Cuban driver. The hotel is three stories high. The ground floor is the dining room, hall and office all in one – reading and bar rooms close by. “Coffee” consisted of oranges peeled whole, muddy coffee poured out of a large tea kettle and hot milk from the same, with bread. For breakfast, we had delicious golden fish, freshly boiled eggs, beef, chops, fruit, etc. The guava jelly was so nice but there was such awful doubt about the cleanliness of any of it that nothing could be relished. All of the food tasted of tobacco smoke. Everyone smoked. We saw many women of the lower classes smoking and all men constantly. We couldn’t have our rooms until twelve. We had the same rooms the Billings vacated, they returned in our boat. Our rooms were scrubbed before we went in to them. All the floors of the hotel were tiled or marble – the ceilings immensely high. Our staircase open; the parlor was on the third floor, no elevator – our rooms were near this parlor and also near most offensive and disgusting water closets. A Cuban family dined privately right at the door of these closets and in the open hall and passage way. The parlor had no furniture but Austrian bent wood chairs and a table – marble floor and a small rug upon which these large rocking chairs were placed in two rows facing each other – each chair had an immense crocheted tidy, very dirty. The fresco painting in the hotel was very crude, water color, blue prevailed. Our rooms had each two iron bedsteads, very high open timber ceiling, a wardrobe, three or four chairs, table, commode, washstand, on the commode stood a water jug with cover – porous and of good shape – this held the drinking water. The beds were curtained with a coarse quality of imitation Nottingham lace – and a valance around the bottoms of them, nothing was clean or comfortable. Pillows were small and made of hair or something like meal in some of them. There were two small well-worm common dirty velvet rugs by the beds."[2]
  2. Albert J. Norton in his book "Norton's complete hand-book of Havana Cuba" (1898) describes in detail the richness of both the materials used in the construction of the hotel, as well as those used for the furniture and the doors and windows, all mahogany Obviously, its owners did not skimp on luxuries and ordered the tableware from the prestigious firm "Bauscher" from Bavaria, Germany. As you can see on the plate that appears in the publication, in the background, there are three detailed black and white images of the hotel and a woman in Victorian dress under the arched entrance to the gallery. The words “Hotel Pasaje” appear below the image. There are two thin, parallel blue lines on the inner edge of the white body.[3]

References
  1. "Del pasaje al hotel". Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  2. "The Glessners Visit Cuba, Part I". Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  3. "HOTEL PASAJE". Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  4. "Hotel Pasaje: para mirar el Capitolio". Retrieved 2022-02-27.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.