File:Standard guide to Cuba - a new and complete guide to the island of Cuba, with maps, illustrations, routes of travel, history, and an English-Spanish phrase book (1909) (14801282853).jpg

Identifier: standardguidetoc00reyn (find matches)
Title: Standard guide to Cuba : a new and complete guide to the island of Cuba, with maps, illustrations, routes of travel, history, and an English-Spanish phrase book
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Reynolds, Charles B. (Charles Bingham), 1856-1940
Subjects:
Publisher: Havana : New York : Foster & Reynolds
Contributing Library: University of Pittsburgh Library System
Digitizing Sponsor: Lyrasis Members and Sloan Foundation

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Text Appearing Before Image:
26 THE STANDARD GUIDE.

The rooms of Havana houses are very large and the ceilings are high,
eighteen feet being the average. In high-roofed houses there are some-
times no ceilings, the apartment being left open to the ridge. The floor is
of tile or cement, without carpet, and there are vast expanses of vacant
wall space. Upholstered furniture is unknown; cool cane and wicker pre-
vail. The rocking-chair is universal—in the house, in the office, in the
committee rooms of the Senate.
The typical hotel bedroom has a tiled floor without any carpet save
for a narrow rug in front of the bed. The ceiling is from 18 to 25 feet
in height; the windows opening from the floor are almost as high; there
are slatted blinds on the outside and solid shutters on the inside, with per-
haps one small pane of glass. The bed is canopied with a mosquito netting
which may be a handsome specimen of lacework; the mattress is very
thin or wanting altogether. A swinging slat screen permits leaving the
bedroom door open.
Text Appearing After Image:

HOTEL BEDROOMS.

PLAZA DE ARMAS.

A GROUP of interesting points which are near together and may be
visited in connection, are clustered about the Plaza de Armas. These are
the Palace, Templete, Fuerza, Cathedral, and the shopping streets Obispo
and O'Reilly. Near the Plaza is the Caballeria Wharf.
It was the practice of the Spaniards when they laid out a new town to
reserve a space in the center as a public square, about which the military
and civil buildings might cluster, and the open field of which might be
used as a drill ground for the soldiery, thus giving to it the name Plaza
de Armas, or place of arms. In keeping with such a custom, this open
square was reserved for a plaza when the city was founded in 1519. Here
we get back to the beginning of Havana. On the east of the square
nearer the shore of the bay still stands a ceiba tree descended from the
ceiba which originally shaded the spot where the founders of the city
held the first mass. On the north is the old fortress La Fuerza, well
named

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