American men, like their counterparts throughout the Western world, were generally not expected to be able or willing to perform household chores before quite recently. Absent a wife or other woman (sister, widowed mother) to keep his household, a man had a couple of options. For men of more ordinary means, especially those who were young and had recently moved to cities from farms, boarding houses were the preferred solution. The woman or family who owned the house would provide meals, laundry, and other domestic services, freeing the man to do manly things (i.e., work for a wage). These arrangements were viewed as temporary, with the man eventually marrying and establishing his own household, with a wife to manage it. For more well-to-do men the calculus was similar. You might ask, why didn't they just buy a house and furnish it with large numbers of servants, like Bruce Wayne or some other playboy bachelor type? Well, the management of household servants was still considered "women's work" in the social economy of the time, and was not something most men wished to be bothered with. The solution was a hotel. Hotels before, say, the 1960s were very different than they are today. They were full-service, offering not just a place to sleep and housekeeping services, but laundry, dining, and a wealth of other comforts to help keep a man staying there perfectly comfortable. Today only the most expensive and exclusive hotels (think the Four Seasons) maintain this full suite of services, which is why you still find celebrities and other wealthy people who live in hotels in Los Angeles and New York. I just read an article in GQ the other day about Justin Bieber, who lives in a hotel in LA. A man living in a hotel in, say, the 1880s, would have had every detail of his life taken care of by hotel staff, offering significant convenience over trying to run his own household, which he was likely not willing or even particularly able to do, anyway.

Put another way: The sorts of people who lived in hotels in the nineteenth century would not have done their own laundry, cleaning, or cooking either way. Whether professional hotel staff or hired servants in a private home took care of these necessities did not really change the contours of such a man's life either way. Further, he would belong to one or more social or dining clubs, which would themselves furnish many of his gustatory needs, as would restaurants, which would become increasingly popular and extravagant throughout the nineteenth century.