"An Intelligent Deal"

Last month, fast-stepping hotelman Conrad Hilton was buttonholed by the Puerto Rico Development Co., a government-backed organization. The Puerto Ricans wanted Connie Hilton to run a new beach hotel in tropical San Juan. Hilton was flattered, but wanted "an intelligent deal." Last week he had it.

The deal calls for the Development Co. to spend about $3 million building and furnishing a lavish ten-story, 300-room hotel, all air-conditioned. When it opens (tentative date: mid-1948), Hilton will take over. All he has to put up is enough cash to buy linen, dishes, pay and train the staff, cover operating expenses. In return, he will get one-third of the profits. Hilton will stand any losses, but nobody expects any. Puerto Rico is already short of hotel rooms, hopes soon to be doing a booming tourist business.

With the signing of this deal, Connie Hilton wound up a year-end whirl which had added Nos. 13, 14 and 15 to his $80,000,000 chain.

Number 14 was Washington's Mayflower, which, although only 21 years old, is already rich with political legend. To get the 1,000-room Mayflower, Connie Hilton paid $2.6 million to Philadelphia's Donner Estates for a controlling bloc (200,000 shares) of the hotel's common stock. With the stock came a sorry financial history. Allen E. Walker, oldtime Washington real-estate man who started to build the Mayflower, lost it in a mortgage deal before he got through putting the basement in. Finally completed at a cost of $13 million by the mortgage-holder, William J. Moore, it went into receivership in 1931. In 1940 the Donner Estates picked up the hotel and its mortgage for 12-c- on the dollar. But lately the Mayflower has been grinding out tidy profits as regularly as it has had to say "Sorry, sir, no rooms left." Its estimated 1946. net: $400,000.

Number 15 was Columbus' Neil House, called "the little Capitol of Ohio" (it's right across High Street from the real Capitol building), also crusty with political legend. Here William Henry Harrison made his headquarters in the "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" campaign of 1840; William McKinley lived there as governor. Other guests: Charles Dickens, Jenny Lind, Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley. The present structure, fourth on the same site, was built in 1923, has 700 rooms. It does an annual business of more than $2,000,000--which is just what Connie Hilton paid for it.

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