The sweet legacy of Hotel Hershey
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
The unlikely story of a chocolate magnate and his hotel fantasy.
Standing atop Pat's Hill looking out over the company town that is Hershey, Pa., it's easy to channel the classic creepy-hotel vibes of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, especially when the property is blanketed in fresh snow. But once you've reached the front desk, any remnants of haunted hotels and wild-eyed Jack Torrances are quick to slip away.
During check-in at most hotels, guests are generally asked if they'd prefer a king or queen-sized bed.At Hotel Hershey, the question is "Milk or dark?" referring to the full-sized candy bar each guest is given along with a room key resembling a Hershey Bar.
A palatial hotel that hands out candy bars at the front desk, has a chocolate spa and smells sweetly of chocolate throughout seems straight from the pages of a long-lost Roald Dahl book. This wildly ornate hotel was instead the brainchild of a millionaire confectioner almost as eccentric as Willy Wonka named Milton Hershey.
"Chocolate always seems to do well during recessions and depressions," explains Albert Rossi, the hotel's resident historian. "People give up that big-ticket item, but not that little reward." Perhaps that's how, at the height of the Great Depression, Milton Hershey was able to construct this 170-room palace of a hotel.
For Hershey, who had made his money in caramel, chocolate and Cuban sugar prior to the market crash, the hotel was a passion project that was never intended to make money — at least, not during the early years. "Other men have their yachts to play with," said Hershey, defending the extravagance of the hotel's plans. "The hotel is my yacht."
An avid traveler, Hershey was inspired by trips to the Mediterranean, southern Europe and northern Africa — particularly Spain, Portugal and Morocco. For his own hotel, Hershey initially hoped to recreate Egypt's Heliopolis Palace Hotel, one of Africa's most luxe properties.
"He acquired the plans for it and thought this is what he wanted to build," says Rossi, before dramatizing architect D. Paul Witmer's reaction to the idea: "'It's much too ornate, much too expensive, we can't get the materials, you realize that our country is in a very bad situation.' Remember, we're smack in the middle of the Depression.
"So he says to his architect, 'OK, if I can't have the Heliopolis, can you incorporate these ideas?' He gives him pictures and postcards of places that he's been that he really admires. That's why we have Moorish architecture in the middle of Pennsylvania Dutch country."
The Hotel Hershey's 1960s-era reception area doesn't do justice to Hershey's Moorish vision the way the Fountain Lobby does. The lobby is equal parts opulent and kitschy, with Spanish-style stucco walls, wooden balconies, terra-cotta tiled overhangs and a ceiling painted with cotton-y cumulus clouds. There are overstuffed couches (where Rossi says guests have a tendency to fall asleep), potted palms and the centerpiece — a mosaic fountain that's been softly bubbling since the hotel's 1933 opening.
Down a short flight of stairs in the lobby is the sun-soaked Circular, the hotel's original restaurant. The story of its semicircular dining room is classic eccentric millionaire lore. "It's circular because it was a mandate from Hershey to his architect that it had to be," Rossi says. "While traveling throughout the world and the United States, many times on business, [Hershey would] be by himself, and he wasn't a very good tipper. They'd put him behind a pillar or next to the kitchen. He said to his architect that he wanted everyone to have a good view. 'No pillars, no corners and I want my diners to be as far away from the kitchen as possible.'"
The Circular was stripped of its white tablecloths as part of a 2013 makeover into a less formal dining option. Where there was once a wooden dance floor, there is now Nowadays, a circular bar featuring carefully crafted cocktails like a sherry martini finished with a floral splash of Lillet. The kitchen is still well out of sight and earshot, though they now plate striped-bass ceviche with cucumber and passionfruit instead of seafood a la Newburgh.
But very little appears to have changed at the across-lobby Iberian, a moodily lit cocktail lounge. A painting of a Moroccan market sits behind the bar, spanning its entire length. Painted by German artist Robert Von Ezdorf and titled Hispaniola, the painting is another piece of the hotel's oddly endearing history. Commissioned the year after the hotel opened, Hispaniola doubles as a game of I Spy. "Look at that pathway that leads out to the sea," Rossi points out. "The mosaic in that pathway is the same pattern that you'll find out in the Fountain Lobby. Look at the tiled roof — that's out there. The same balcony is out there, and there's similarities in the bumps on the wall and the lanterns. And there's the fountain."
But the painting's recognizable elements aren't nearly as fascinating as the puzzles. Walking from one end of the bar to the other, the ocean horizon seems to shift dramatically. And why exactly is one of the striped lampposts leaning off the dock? Rossi also has an answer for this question via veteran Iberian bartender Joe Frascella. "So one day I asked Joe ... about the leaning post [and] he ... said, 'Al, that's for me. Whenever that straightens out for the people I'm serving, I know I have to cut them off.'"
When beverage director Brian Confair took that position six years ago, the first thing he did was revamp the martini program. "The martinis are dangerous," he explains. "We wanted the cocktails to taste like the candy, we didn't want to taste the alcohol, we wanted them to be palate-friendly — and they are. You don't realize that you just had three of the chocolate martinis until you stand up."
Garnished with mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Hershey's Kisses and Rolos, the martinis are only a part of the work Confair does to keep the hotel's beverage program not only chocolate-y, but relevant. Confair devotes the majority of his taps to neighboring breweries like Lancaster, Stoudt's and Tröegs. (Tröegs' headquarters and tasting room are actually just down the road.)
Confair brings in winemakers for ticketed dinners, throws a wine festival on the hotel's grounds in the fall and teaches a dessert-and-wine-pairing class through the end of February. Working with tiles of chocolate from Hershey's high-end Scharffen Berger line and desserts specially created by hotel pastry chef Cher Harris, instructor Confair zips though a slew of pairings, ranging from a chocolate-infused port-like wine made at a local vineyard with a flourless chocolate cake, to a Piedmontese dolcetto with a milk chocolate praline tart.
If you'd prefer your chocolate in a different sensory form, the hotel's Chocolate Spa offers a variety of appropriately themed services, including a polishing scrub that incorporates cocoa-bean husks and walnut. Perhaps more expected is the chocolate mandarin body wash, among other candy-scented miniature toiletries, placed in all the guest bathrooms.
In warmer months, visitors can head down from the hotel to Hersheypark outdoor amusement park (excepting special events, it's closed from early September until early May) and enjoy appropriately named rides like the Cocoa Cruiser. But the Hershey Story, a somewhat uncomfortably reverential museum devoted to Milton Hershey and his legacy, is open year-round. Among the more interesting pieces of Hershey ephemera found there is a historic chocolate-factory handbook, from which you can learn some of the perks of working for the company: "Chocolate is available to everyone while at work. Eat as much as you want. You can get milk or chocolate milk in the refrigerated cabinets at convenient locations throughout the plant. But be sure to leave your bottles in the proper places. Broken glass is dangerous and we can't risk having it get in any of our product."
Just like Milton Hershey's vision for a Mediterranean-inspired palace in the heart of Lancaster County, the Hotel Hershey has an incongruous charm, and is never short on fascinating Hershey lore. "I don't care where you go in the hotel, every part has a story in it," Rossi says. You could say the same of candy — there isn't a room in the hotel that doesn't have at least a bowl of foil-wrapped Kisses.
