What happened to Hilton’s ‘hotel on the Moon’?
In
1958 the Boulevard Room at the swanky Conrad Hilton Hotel in downtown
Chicago offered delicious steaks, a lavish stage show, and a curious
peek at the future.
At the front of the grand hall was what was
billed as the “largest hotel ice rink in the country”, on which troops
of tutu-wearing girls danced for the crowds of diners. It was here, in
the summer heat of August that black-tie wearing customers were given
the first teaser of a legend that survives to this day: Hilton Hotels
was going to the Moon.
On stage, the final scene for the dancers
was called “out of this world”. Although details of the performance are
scarce, a Chicago-area newspaper called the Suburbanite Economist wrote
that it was set in a “plush” hotel called the Lunar Hilton. The lavish
show caught the writers’ imagination and he took it to its logical
conclusion. As the 27 August 1958 edition put it: “this could mean that
the Hilton chain is dickering with the idea of opening the first hotel
on the Moon.”
Fast forward to 2009 and an episode of the popular
TV series Mad Men features the louche Don Draper and his team creating a
fictional ad campaign for a Hilton Hotel on the Moon. “I want a Hilton
on the Moon; that’s where we are headed,” says “Connie” Hilton at one
point. Although the series is fiction, it got me wondering: had Hilton
hotels ever really planned to go into space?
When the writers of
Mad Men were researching the programme, their go-to man was Dr Mark
Young, who oversees the hotel founder’s archive at the University of
Houston. He seemed like an obvious person to shed light on the story.
According
to Dr Young, there’s no evidence that Conrad Hilton was behind the
vision of a hotel on the Moon. “[The writers of Mad Men] contacted me to
learn about Conrad Hilton so I talked with them, but when I watched it
this Moon thing came out of nowhere and I thought, ‘wait a minute,
that’s not Conrad Hilton at all’.”
In fact, he says, it was one of
Conrad Hilton’s sons, Barron Hilton, who appears to have been the true
evangelist for a Hilton on the Moon. “He, like everyone else was very
captivated by the space age,” says Dr Young.
‘Earth view’
Barron
was elected as vice-president of Hilton Hotels in 1954, serving behind
his father. Just four years later the Suburbanite Economist article
appeared – the earliest reference to the idea I can find. I expect it
will be difficult to find anything much earlier. That was the beginning
of space fever in the United States, as the Russians had launched
Sputnik in October of 1957, kicking off the Space Age - a period of
tremendous fear and wide-eyed hope for what was to come.
Throughout
later years, the idea appears again and again in popular culture. In
the 28 October 1962 episode of The Jetsons, The Good Little Scouts,
George brings Elroy’s scout troop to the Moon and in a quick, fleeting
shot we see the Moonhattan Tilton, a clear reference to the Manhattan
Hilton hotel. And in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film “2001: A Space
Odyssey” there is an office marked “Hilton Space Station 5” on the
glass exterior, where people could presumably make reservations for the
Hilton hotel on the film’s orbiting space station.
Though it wasn’t Conrad’s idea he certainly didn’t discourage the
idea of a hotel on the Moon. The March 1963 issue of Cosmopolitan
magazine ran a long and glowing profile on Conrad Hilton as the
hard-nosed businessman who understood what people wanted and would stop
at nothing to give it to them. Though not a quote from “Connie” himself,
the article nonetheless ends with a space age promise from the writer:
“it won’t be very long before our astronauts land on the Moon and
immediately behind them will be Connie Hilton with his plans for his
Lunar Hilton Hotel.”
Those plans began to take off in 1967.
Barron, who was then president of Hilton, told the Wall Street Journal
that he was planning to cut the ribbon at an opening ceremony for a
Lunar Hilton hotel within his lifetime. He described the Lunar Hilton as
a 100-room hotel that would be built below the surface. Guests would
gather around a piano bar in an observation dome that allowed them to
gaze back at earth.
Barron’s desire to build a Hilton on the Moon -
whether it was merely clever PR or something more sincere - struck a
chord with people all over the world. The hotel group even printed
promotional “reservations cards” for customers to reserve a hotel room
on the Moon. “In the [Hilton] archive we’ve got hundreds, if not
thousands, of letters of people writing in to him,” says Dr Young.
“They’d seen the picture of the reservation form and they wanted to get
their name on there.
“You read the letters, from all around the
world - I always remember the one from Pakistan for some reason it
stands out in my mind -- but people really wanted to know that sometime
in [their] lifetime we’ll have hotels on the Moon.”
‘Freeze-dried steak’
The
archive that Dr. Young oversees in Texas also contains promotional
Lunar Hilton hotel keys which were distributed as promotional item in
hotels. “The idea that we’d have a plastic key card like we do today was
- I guess - just way too far out for ‘67, ‘68. And so [the Lunar Hilton
key] looks like an old fashioned hotel room key, except it’s sleek,”
Dr. Young said.
Just days before the first Moon landings in 1969,
the Hilton lunar vision reappeared. Never one to miss an opportunity to
sell the idea (or at least the hotel chain), Barron addressed the
American Astronomical Society where he once again pressed that Hilton
would soon be on the Moon. “I firmly believe that we are going to have
hotels in outer space, perhaps even soon enough for me to officiate at
the formal opening of the first,” he told the assembled crowd.
With
the world gripped by Moon fever, it was an obvious story for newspapers
recorded every twist and turn of the space race. For example, an
article in the 15 July Lowell Sun in Lowell, Massachusetts picked up on
the speech and painted a picture of the hotel of the future. Their story
relies heavily on images of food and alcohol pills, an idea
we examined here a few months back.
“Imagine
yourself in the Galaxy Lounge of the Lunar Hilton - the first hotel on
the Moon. In place of a ceiling, a transparent dome allows you to view
the heavens as you never could see them from beneath the thick
atmosphere covering Earth, Mars looks bigger and redder, the star do not
twinkle, and you are just in time to watch an Earth-set,” it reads.
“You order a martini. The bartender pushes a button and out comes a
pre-measured, pre-cooled mixture of pure ethyl alcohol and distilled
water -- 80 proof. Into the mixture he droops a gin and vermouth tablet.
As you sip the result, the huge bright-blue Earth slips below the
stark, brown horizon and you begin to think about a freeze-dried steak
for dinner.”
Clearly, Barron’s vision has yet come to pass, but the idea has never fully gone away. In the late 1990s, the firm backed
plans for a private orbiting space station
whilst in a separate plan, British architect Peter Inston was
commissioned to draw up a plan for a 5,000-room domed structure on the
Moon for the hotel chain. As the plans were shown off, the then
president of the firm – Peter George – reportedly repeated the hotel’s
maxim: “One day soon, there will be hotels on the Moon. The Hilton wants
to be the first.”
It’s difficult to know whether successive
Hilton bosses actually believe this message or whether, as is perhaps
more likely, they have simply hit on perhaps one of the longest and most
imaginative marketing campaigns in history. Certainly, Conrad Hilton’s
grandson, Steve Hilton, has suggested that it was an idea that was never
meant to be taken seriously. Instead, he said in a
2009 interview following the Mad Men episode, that he thought it was meant to be “symbolic”.
Certainly
the idea seems to have disappeared in recent years. But the recent
surge of commercial activity in space means that perhaps it could soon
return. If, and when it does, Hilton may have to compete with another
hotelier in the race to the Moon.
In 2006, Robert Bigelow, the
former owner of the Budget Suites of America chain, launched an
inflatable habitat capsule into space. In 2007 another followed, and his
company –
Bigelow aerospace – has begun working on a full scale capsule which could, he has said, form the basis of a Moon habitat.
Whether the plan is anything more than an idea worthy of Don Draper, only time will tell.
The female mountain chicken frog lays its eggs into a special self-made foamy nest
The mountain chicken tadpoles were fed unfertilised eggs every few days
It is more than half a century since the idea of a Hilton hotel on the
Moon was first mooted . Ever since the plan has resurfaced periodically,
making Matt Novak wonder if we are now any closer or whether there was
ever a plan at all.
