It was Monday, Jan. 23, and the grand lobby of the $200 million Philadelphia Marriott did not look very grand at all.
It was dark and empty and bare. Construction dust was everywhere. The brass did not gleam. The marble did not shine.
In only five days, this 1,200-room hotel-the biggest in Pennsylvania and vital to the success of the Convention Center-would open, with 300 guests scheduled to arrive.
But the hotel did not look ready. Downstairs in the basement, the man responsible for making sure that everything shined was whipping his team of polishers, cleaners and bed-makers into shape.
With more than 100 “guest-service associates” gathered about him (that’s what Marriott calls the housekeeping staff), Terrance Todd explained that today Floors 10 through 17 would be cleaned and made up. The hotel has 23 floors.
Nearby, the pastry kitchen was churning out cakes and pastries that would not be sold but, instead, served to tasting panels of employees.
Upstairs on the fifth floor, where Salon E had been turned into a huge tailor shop, hundreds of uniforms-a dozen different types-were being distributed to personnel who had been measured weeks before.
And everywhere the mood seemed upbeat, the energy palpable. It had the feeling of back stage on opening night, just before the curtain goes up.
After finishing the required three minutes of limbering-up exercises in the basement, GSA-trainee Anita Caffee went to clean rooms on the 10th floor with her six-member team, headed by a star GSA borrowed from another Marriott hotel. A task force of 175 trainers had been flown in for the three-week training period and housed in the hotel. Considered the best in their departments, they had been chosen from 25 Marriotts throughout the country for the honor of training the Philadelphia new-hires.
A cheerful woman with sparkling eyes and a big smile, Caffee said she had gotten the trainee job by answering a newspaper ad and making it through three interviews, the final one lasting more than half an hour and geared to finding friendly people.
Finally Caffee received notification that she was being scheduled for drug screening.
“I knew I was in then,” she said, with a big, self-satisfied smile, as she swept a polishing cloth across a now gleaming mirror. She had been a phone-caller with a collection agency, but wanted to make hotel work her career.
“This is just the beginning,” she said, the big smile filling her face again.
More than 15,000 people had applied for the hotel’s 650 jobs. Chamber maids are paid $7.88 an hour plus health and other fringe benefits. This is considerably more than the $4.25 paid to waiters, bartenders and room-service people, who may make $100 a night in tips.
Because she was new, Caffee would make up only five rooms this day. When fully trained, she would be expected to do 15 rooms a day, taking an average of 22 minutes for each.
The potted plants and palm trees from Florida, wrapped in brown paper, arrived in the lobby Tuesday morning.
Few of the table lamps in the lobby lounge-a comfy collection of tables, sofas and chairs arranged around a little pool and waterfall-were lit.
And the shelves of the lobby bar were empty, the glasses still in boxes in a storeroom somewhere and the liquor bottles awaiting approval by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.
The 600 bottles of liquor and 1,200 bottles of wine-one quarter of what the hotel would ultimately have-were already loaded aboard trucks, but could not be shipped before approval, to be granted the next day.
Late Tuesday afternoon, 16 bartenders and cocktail servers gathered in one of the meeting rooms to review what they had been taught about liquor and drunks.
The results of the written test taken the day before did not satisfy their instructor, Rod Swanson, food and beverage director of the Greensboro Marriott in North Carolina. Swanson reviewed the results and then explained the “two-step method” of pouring beer.
Step One-Ask the customer for permission to pour the beer and then empty three quarters of the bottle into the center of the glass, rather than down the sides (to make a bigger head).
Step Two-Return when the glass is almost empty, pour the remaining contents of the bottle, which doesn’t have much left, and say, “May I bring you another one.”
“Boom, the second sale,” Swanson says, explaining the reasoning behind the two-step method of pouring.
The shiny new silverware and the wine and water glasses were neatly arranged on the white table cloths, and eight servers in black aprons and white shirts had gathered in the corner of JW’s Steakhouse, overlooking the empty lobby.
In less than an hour, JW’s would receive its first make-believe customers (30 employees and invited guests), and Paul Rossi wanted to make sure that everyone knew what was expected of him or her.
The steakhouse’s chief chef and manager, Sterling Burpee, a vegetarian, left this part of the training to Rossi, the corporation’s director of restaurant and bar-concept development. A paid perfectionist, Rossi was particularly concerned that everyone be comfortable with his or her script as well as all the little things, such as leaving the chairs slightly pulled away from the tables so the tablecloth falls free.
The scripts are a new concept that the Marriott introduced last year in which the servers are given things to say to promote sales. The scripts are rehearsed just before the restaurant opens for business, when Rossi lines up and inspects the servers, who must hold up the tools of their trade-a pen, corkscrew and table crumb scraper-and then recite.
“If you really want to treat yourself,” recites one server, “we wouldn’t want you to miss our New York strip steak.” Scripting has increased checks at JW’s by an average of $3, Rossi said.
Dress rehearsal for the hotel came on Wednesday when 300 employees from other Marriott hotels and 70 members of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce arrived for food and drink, compliments of the hotel.
The lobby was lit up now and felt much warmer, the potted palms and trees having been placed throughout the area. Now rather than a lot of casually dressed people, staff in many different uniforms were everywhere-the housekeeping staff in black dresses and white aprons, the bartenders in black vests and bow ties, cocktail waitresses in flowered print dresses, the doormen in white tunics with stripes on the arms.
But mostly it was the sound of people talking and laughing and drinking that brought the lobby to life.
The 300 invited Marriott employees headed to the fifth floor for their reception and banquet dinner. The folks from the Chamber of Commerce went to JW’s for $25 steaks and lobsters, which would cost them nothing. And off-duty hotel employees were treated to dinner in Allie’s Restaurant and Sidewalk Cafe.
It looked like a real functioning hotel now. But still there were signs that everything was not quite ready.
Workmen in rubber boots were splashing around in the fountain in the central lounge area, trying to get the water falls working.
Wet-paint signs were everywhere. The lobby bar looked bare, with no colorfully labeled liquor bottles on the shelves. The state had approved the hotel’s liquor license only hours before, and workers were still unloading trucks.
A large easel had been set up in front of the check-in counter with big sheets of paper and instructions written in marker-pen to all GSAs.
“Greet every guest,” said the first one, “in a warm, friendly manner. Also be sure to relax and take your time.”
And the hotel’s computer-known by its unfortunate initials PMS (property management system)-was down.
Thursday was the day for whipping the GSAs into a frenzy of enthusiasm and eager anticipation of the opening day, now only hours away.
First, they ate fillet mignon in the banquet hall, compliments of the hotel. Then they got their first paychecks. And, finally, they attended a rally in the grand ballroom, which has been festooned with thousands of pastel-colored balloons, colorful carts serving popcorn and cotton candy and 705 chairs arranged in a chevron pattern, a tradition at Marriott.
They were greeted by Rocky, speaking illiterately and dressed in his boxing training sweats and wool cap. They were greeted from the podium by Benjamin Franklin, who said, “I have not seen this much excitement in Philadelphia since 1776,” provoking a tidal wave of hoots and cheers from the hundreds of employees clustered in same-uniform groups.
Hotel Manager Curtis Dean called the hotel “the palace on Market Street,” and the employees were its princes and princesses. Once more the huge room was filled with cheers.
Again they cheered when television star Marla Gibbs, who played Florence in “The Jeffersons,” walked into the room to address them on the virtues of self-respect and hard work.
Finally, at 4:10, a ribbon was cut, someone said the hotel was now officially open and the Avalon String Band from Second and Tasker Streets came marching in to bring the pep rally to a cheering, strutting conclusion.
