Stanley Turkel, whose career as a hotelier, hospitality consultant and historian required him to check into more hostelries than a million-mile frequent flier, died on Aug. 12 in his own bed in Arlington, Va. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by his son, Marc Turkel.
In 10 books and 270 blog posts, Mr. Turkel (pronounced tur-KELL) explored the idiosyncrasies of lodgings in New York and around the world — from the history of the original hyphen in the name of the Waldorf Astoria in New York to the revelation that the Hotel Monteleone’s Carousel Piano Bar in New Orleans revolves on 2,000 steel rollers.
He introduced readers to César Ritz, the namesake of hotels, a snack cracker and an adjective. He recalled the ubiquitous windup figure of a harried executive that the Sheraton chain featured in a campaign with the slogan “Keyed-Up Executives Unwind at Sheraton.”
Mr. Turkel was more than a hotel maven; he was also a polymath. A civic activist, he was president from 1967 to 1978 of the City Club of New York, an organization whose influence over municipal government waned in the final decades of the 20th century. He subsequently served as chairman and was a trustee of the club for 30 years.
Beginning in 1978 Mr. Turkel edited The Gadfly, the club’s bulletin, and delighted in posing what he called impertinent questions to public officials, both in print and in person.
He was also active in the civil rights movement; he attended a six-lecture course with W.E.B. Du Bois in 1956, joined the March on Washington in 1963 and wrote his first book, when he was 79, on Reconstruction.
Mr. Turkel was highly opinionated and expressed his views on a wide range of subjects without reservation. He was an inveterate correspondent to The New York Times: Some 40 of his Letters to the Editor were published between 1961 and 1989 — on subjects from a recommendation that major corporations adopt subway stations to a complaint that the offensive strategies used by professional football coaches had become “boring, hackneyed and wholly predictable.”
His professional expertise, however, was hotel management, a field he entered after apprenticing in his father’s laundry business in Manhattan.
In 1963, he was hired by the brothers Laurence and Preston Robert Tisch, who owned the Loews Corporation, to manage their 1,800-room Americana Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan (now the Sheraton New York Times Square). He then ran the Drake Hotel, at Park Avenue and East 56th…
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