‘Ritz’: The Roof Garden

This chapter considers interwar New York hotels, the rise of hotel brands and chains, and the Ritz in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction. The Ritz was a fiction of global finance: a licensing apparatus for a loose, decentralised and self-propagating franchise. The value of the Ritz was not in bricks and mortar but in its name and its brand. The Ritz aesthetic was an anticipation of corporate minimalism: white walls and white curtains with minimal decorative ornaments, culminating in the evaporated surfaces of its rooftop gardens. Its whiteness and transparency were fitting architectural expressions of the Ritz as a deterritorialised brand. Like the Ritz, F. Scott Fitzgerald (or ‘Fitz’) was a branded entity. For Fitzgerald, the pleasure of the Ritz and its roof garden was in its nothingness: a desirable nowhere into which the moneyed elite could escape. This chapter reads ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ as an allegory for capital’s struggle to escape the physicality of bricks and mortar. It then considers ‘May Day’, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, where those with means strive toward the mobility and immateriality of ‘Ritz’ and of capital itself.