One of my favorite finds from all my digging is a book from 1893, the same year The Pfister opened. It’s a souvenir book written by Wm. J. Anderson, “compliments of Charles Pfister” himself. The Pfister actually holds two copies in its own collection, a hardcover and a softcover, and there’s a third copy over at the Milwaukee Public Library. Same year, just scattered into different hands since. Makes me think there were more printed than you’d expect for something this detailed.
I love it first for the illustrations. There are cathedral drawings on page 14, and since I live in Cathedral Square myself, it was fun spotting a few I recognized. The detail work throughout is just as good. Page 6 has a corner flourish so intricate I kept tracing it with my eyes. Page 20 has another, completely different from the first.
But what I really love is what the book answered. Questions I’d been chasing for a while, about how certain rooms were originally used, about where those bronze lion statues in the lobby actually came from. The kind of detail that’s nearly impossible to pin down once enough time passes and enough versions of the story get told.
The book also spends a fair amount of ink bragging that The Pfister was the most fireproof building in the world. At first that reads almost funny, until you remember how many hotels and homes were lost to fire in that era, and how many lives went with them. Fireproofing wasn’t a marketing gimmick here. It was one of the genuinely modern things about the building when it opened, right alongside electricity and individual thermostats in every room. Read in that light, the bragging makes sense. It was a real promise.
Here’s what I find most interesting, though. Books like this were their own genre in the Victorian era. Hotels, cities, and expositions commissioned them to mark an opening or an event, something a guest could keep, more substantial than a guidebook. And 1893, the very year this one was printed, is also the year the first American postcard made explicitly as a souvenir appeared at the Chicago World’s Fair. Within a decade or so, postcards took over. They were cheap, fast to send, and easy to collect by the album-full. The elaborate souvenir book started to fade out as a format not long after.
So this book sits right at that hinge point. Before the postcard took over as the way people carried a place home with them.
It’s been digitized, so anyone can flip through the pages online now. But there’s nothing quite like holding the original. Knowing it sat in this very building, possibly handed to a guest in 1893, and somehow made its way back here.
— Megan