eBay: The Ultimate Souvenir Shop

By Chadner Navarro
December 5, 2011

It’s a universally acknowledged fact that a lot of people use eBay: Fashion designers and interior decorators browse the online marketplace for inspiration; you stalk it for great deals on vintage Gucci; and if it isn’t a great source for those Missoni for Target pieces that flew off the shelves in October, I don’t know what is.

But did you know hotels all over also scour eBay for items from their past? With a bottomless pool of listings, eBay has become the go-to for historic hotels looking to reclaim authentic pieces of their history. Whether it’s for vintage black-and-white photographs of people vacationing on their properties or decades-old menus that randomly surface on the site, for these homes-away-from-home, getting their hands on these relics is priceless.

Having been continuously welcoming guests since 1855, downtown Boston’s super luxe Omni Parker House is the U.S.’s longest running hotel. It was the crash pad for the likes of Joan Crawford and Judy Garland, while FDR and JFK used it for meetings and press conferences. (You can also thank the on-site Parker’s Restaurant for creating the Boston Cream Pie as well as its namesake Parker House rolls.) The property’s history is viewed with such importance that a framed oil painting of founder Harvey Parker was shipped to the hotel by a fan with the note, “Harvey needs to be home.” But for treasures not magnanimously gifted to the Omni Parker House, its Area Director for Sales and Marketing Dave Ritchie vigilantly combs through eBay’s stock for meaningful finds.

Parker House

The historic Parker House hotel and the key (found on eBay) used by Charles Dickens to check in to the hotel in 1867.

“[These items] help tell our story,” Ritchie explains. “We use [them] for our tours of the hotel and to celebrate our past,” For Ritchie, items dating from the early days of the hotel (1855 and 1927) are most important, as they are the most rare.

A particularly special eBay-found relic is the key author Charles Dickens used to check in to the hotel in 1867. Dickens was in town to stage the first performance of “A Christmas Carol” at the Omni Parker House in front of Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and Hawthorne — the same guys he joined at the hotel for those famed Saturday Club meetings. For the Parker House’s glamorous history, this key might be hard to top.

But significant items don’t have to be linked to the hotel’s laundry list of celebrity clientele. A 1942 Christmas menu from Parker’s Restaurant picked up for $3, for example, is considered among Ritchie’s most impressive eBay purchases. “It has become a great addition to our collection,” he says of the exclusive, hard-to-find menu. “[Current] guests are able to see the changes we made to the number of menu options, pricing and the type of cuisine.”

For Elaine Normile, the historian at the 85-year-old Renaissance Vinoy Resort & Golf Club (a property listed on the National Register of Historic Places) in St. Petersburg, Florida, preserving her hotel’s past is all about curating unique pieces that tell engaging stories. Displayed in the Vinoy History Gallery are collected items that range from a lobby chandelier from 1925 to pieces of dining plates, including a Syracuse China 1957 Vinoy Hotel Plate that was purchased on eBay for $34.99 to replace a version stolen from the hotel.

But Normile considers paraphernalia that provide a peek into the hotel’s previous incarnations to be the most exciting, which is why a section of the Gallery is dedicated entirely to postcards, some of which were bought on eBay.

Vinoy

The Vinoy Hotel and items, including some purchased on eBay, from the Vinoy History Gallery.

“I particularly like the ones that are postmarked and have handwritten messages. They tell us a lot about where guests were visiting from, what their experience was at the Vinoy and in St. Petersburg, how long they stayed, etc. Each is an treasured oral history,” she explains.

The Dunton Hot Springs, a high-end mountainside retreat in the Colorado Rockies, struck gold on eBay when a friend of owner Christoph Henkel found a lot of 55 photographs from a family’s vacation on the property. Now, they are framed and decorate the walls of the resort.   “It’s a shame that [the family] sold them, because on some, it is written on the back ‘Me and mom at Dunton, 1915’ or similar,” Dunton’s General Manager Edoardo Rossi says. “But still, we are very happy to have them.”

Dunton

The Dunton Hot Springs Hotel. Photos on the wall at the bottom right are part of a lot of photos purchased on eBay of a family's vacation on the property in the early 20th century.

As diligent as these collectors are about finding these historic items, the super fast pace of eBay’s bidding system has led to some disappointing losses. Normile of the Renaissance Vinoy Resort & Golf Club recalls a recent defeat: “There was a letter that was found in a Tennessee farm house, written by a service man stationed here in the 1940s. I’d never seen that stationery before. It was a U.S. Army Air Force stationery with all the hotels the service men stayed in while in St. Petersburg, including the Vinoy. I would like to know what he wrote, but I was outbid. I think it sold for around $50.”

But if you’re an eBay ninja and can tumble with the best of them, you can create your own hotel-themed collection of old-school goodies with our suggested eBay listings.