Living in a hotel, with meals, in the 1930s in Berkeley, California for $60 a month


Something that has always fascinated me is reading about people who lived in hotels, which was fairly common in the 1930s. I guess that people still do it, in big cities, but it takes quite a stretch of my imagination to picture myself doing it. But this billboard, which I found yesterday on the Duke site, is helping me to imagine it.

Mostly I'm fascinated by the price. Staying in modern comfort, in a hotel in Berkeley, California for sixty dollars a month (with two meals) or thirty dollars a month (without meals) just kinda boggles my mind. That would be two, or one dollar, a day, and while I've lived a long life, even cheap motels have never been that cheap in my lifetime. And it makes me wonder if it really was cheap?

This would have been in the '30s, during the Depression, so maybe it wasn't as cheap as our 21st-Century eyes see it. In those days people would say, "Buddy can you spare a dime?" and it meant something. You could buy more than a candy bar for a dime, you could go get a meal. I could do the "inflation calculator", but I really don't like that, because to me just the cold numbers don't tell it all.

As far as I know, San Francisco has been crowded, and pricey, for a very long time. This may have been far enough away from the city to be cheaper, but I can't imagine that it would have been a cheap hotel. Obviously there were bellboys (which they show in a drawing) who would carry your luggage, and my best guess is that there was a decent restaurant where you could go and get your two meals a day. I suppose that you were on your own for the third one (do you think that maybe they didn't give you dinner?).

The address just says Durant near Telegraph, so I'm not sure of the exact location of the Hotel Durant. If you know, please tell me and I'll update this post. Sounds to me as if the area wasn't that crowded in the 1930s, or maybe this hotel was easy to see.

Good morning! We're in Berkeley in the 1930s, where would you like to go today?


Update: This hotel is still there, and is now called the Graduate Berkeley. Prices have gone up a bit.




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