New York abounds in hotels – how could it
not, given the constant influx of visitors? -- and some of them have become
legendary. But it wasn’t always this
way. Back in the eighteenth century
there were no hotels in the sense that we use the term, only inns or taverns
that were usually remodeled private houses.
The first building erected specifically to serve as a hotel in the United
States was probably the City Hotel, built in the 1790s on lower Broadway. Its large assembly room housed prestigious
social functions and concerts, until it was demolished in 1849 to make room for
shops.
The nineteenth century saw the appearance
of palace hotels designed to offer Everyman the comfort and luxury enjoyed by
the ruling classes of Europe, a glowing democratic concept that would also, if
done right, line the pockets of architects and managers. The first of these was the Astor House, on lower Broadway opposite City Hall
Park. A five-story granite Greek Revival
structure, it was built in 1834-36 for John Jacob Astor, the fur trade king
turned real-estate magnate. Hailed as
the “grandest mass” in town, it had many fine public rooms, 309 rooms that
would house up to 800 guests, and running water pumped by steam to the upper
stories – an unprecedented luxury and engineering feat in a city that had yet
to build a modern water supply system providing running water to public and
private structures.
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The Astor House also had gas lighting
provided by its own plant, and a restaurant where guests and local merchants
could choose from some thirty meat and fish dishes daily. Its ballroom hosted the well-attended balls
of the elite, and its corridors were crowded daily with merchants and loafers
whose manners, to judge by a contemporary sketch, left something to be desired,
since many sprawled on their chairs and propped their feet up on whatever
object – table or chair or wall– offered them a foot rest: the very sort of
slovenly manners that Mrs. Trollope, the quintessential sharp-tongued English
biddy, had skewered deliciously in her travel book Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). Yet for decades this hotel was an
internationally renowned meeting place for literati and the powerful, until the
city’s expansion northward left it eclipsed by newer hotels farther
uptown.
But even in those later years it was of
note, for during the Civil War its vast Rotunda Bar was a popular meeting place
for war contractors and the government officials they dealt with, and assorted
wheeler-dealers looking to patriotically line their own pockets. In the gas-lit, smoke-filled atmosphere a
minister without a congregation might be tracking down rumors of a supply of
imported Enfield rifles held up for some reason by Customs, while a commission
broker, having delivered to the Army five thousand overcoats of the best cheap
shoddy on the market (which might, or might not, turn spongy if exposed to heavy
rain), celebrated the deal with a toast to the “old flag, the true flag, the red,
white, and blue flag,” clinking whisky glasses with a compliant Army inspector
(a pal of his) and an assistant quartermaster general.
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| The St. Nicholas Hotel, 1853. |
Meanwhile, as the city surged uptown, the six-story,
600-room St. Nicholas Hotel opened on Broadway at Broome Street in 1853. A massive structure with a gleaming white marble
façade, it offered the innovation of warm air circulating through registers to
every room – a luxury that even the Astor House couldn’t offer. Other attractions included walnut wainscoting,
frescoed ceilings, gas-lit chandeliers, hot running water, a telegraph in the
lobby, a bridal room with four chandeliers and a canopied bed upholstered in
white satin, and steam-powered washing machines in the basement. There were opulent parlors for ladies and
gentlemen, a sumptuous reading room, and a stately second-floor dining room
where liveried Irish servants escorted guests to their seats. And on Broadway right next to the hotel’s
main entrance was Phalon’s Hair-Dressing Establishment where, under a frescoed
ceiling with an ornate domed skylight, gentlemen could be trimmed, shaved, and
groomed with fragrant oils and greases and pale rum in an atmosphere that
observers likened to the palace of an Eastern potentate.
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The St. Nicholas seemed the very last word
in luxury and sumptuous technology, yet it too was destined to be eclipsed, for
in 1859 the Fifth Avenue Hotel opened at Fifth Avenue between 23rd
and 24th streets, opposite Madison Square. A magnificent six-story building of brick
faced with white marble, it had the breathtaking novelty of a “vertical screw
railway,” the first passenger elevator installed in a hotel in the United
States, a cumbersome affair powered by a stationary steam engine that – to the
astonishment and wonder of all – could carry passengers to the upper
floors. The hotel’s sober Italianate
exterior masked a number of ground-floor
public rooms that were richly furnished with gilt wood, crimson or green
curtains, and costly carpets. Four
hundred servants looked after the guests, who enjoyed private bathrooms and a
fireplace in every room.
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| The Fifth Avenue Hotel, 1859. |
An instant success, the hotel’s reading
room was soon filled with gentlemen scanning newspapers, its dining room was
jammed with diners, and certain ground-floor rooms became the preferred evening
gathering place for Wall Street brokers and speculators after the stock
exchange had closed. Hotel guests
marveled at the jabbering throng trading tips and rumors, and marveled even
more when the throng suddenly fell silent and parted, making way for the august
and towering presence of Cornelius Vanderbilt, endearingly known in the 1860s
as “Old Sixty Millions,” the richest man in the country, whose prospering
railroad empire would earn him, by the 1870s, the name of “Old Eighty
Millions.”
It should now be clear that each of the nineteenth-century
palace hotels endeavored to outdo its predecessors in offering guests the
latest in comfort, luxury, and technological advances, and that they were more
than just sanctuaries where weary travelers could lay their weary but dazzled
heads. They were also social centers, dining establishments, and even, on
occasion, political headquarters where party members or their bosses met to
make significant decisions regarding upcoming elections.
New York then and now has had too many
hotels of every rank, from the palatial to the most modest and budget-prone,
for me to list them here. So I’ll focus
on those that have something special going for them, something that gives them
an aura of distinction and prestige.
The Plaza Hotel at 59th Street
and Fifth Avenue, at the southeastern corner of Central Park and overlooking
Grand Army Plaza, is a massive 20-story French Renaissance chateau-style edifice
built in 1907 and a National Historic Landmark since 1986. Kings, presidents, ambassadors, celebrities,
CEOs, and world travelers have stayed there over the years, not to mention the
Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Beatles on their first trip to the U.S. in
February 1964. The sedate Plaza was
dismayed to learn that the rooms reserved for “four English gentlemen” were
meant for the Beatles, and were further dismayed by the screaming fans, mostly
teen-age females, who, once the Beatles had arrived, created pandemonium outside. The foursome’s return to England inspired in
the hotel a deep sigh of relief, and they were glad to let other hotels host
the rock band on their later visits to the city.
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| The Plaza Hotel today. Yarl |
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| What the Plaza was unhappy about in 1964. |
The Plaza has had a series of owners and
is now owned by Sahara India Pariwar, an Indian conglomerate that is currently
trying to sell it. Though today it
claims to strike a balance between a storied past and a limitless future, one
wonders if its glory days are long since past.
But there’s hope: it claims to be the first hotel in the world to offer
iPads for all guests, allowing them, with the touch of a screen, to order
in-room meals, communicate with the Concierge, request wake-up calls, and check
airline schedules and print boarding passes.
But it can’t get them into the legendary Oak Room, which has ceased to
exist.
Only one other New York hotel enjoys the
status of National Historic Landmark: the looming 47-story Waldorf Astoria, the
second of that name, occupying the entire block between Lexington and Park
avenues and between 49th and 50th streets, a massive limestone
structure in what is described as “restrained Art Deco style” that opened in
1931. With twin towers topped by
bronze-clad cupolas rising above the twenty floors of the main building, its
great mass has a majesty all its own; it overwhelms. The 1413 guest rooms include 181 in the
Waldorf Towers, a hotel within a hotel occupying floors 27 through 42, and of
those 181 there are 121 luxury suites often named for eminent guests who once
resided there: the Presidential Suite, the Elizabeth Taylor Suite, etc. Those guests have included ex-president
Herbert Hoover, who lived there for over 30 years, Cole Porter, Douglas
MacArthur, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, society hostess and party-giver Elsa Maxwell (who got a rent-free suite, in hopes she would lure the affluent), and Bugsy Siegel and
Lucky Luciano.
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| The Waldorf Astoria as seen from the north, with St. Bartholomew's Church. Reading Tom |
Wait a minute – Bugsy Siegel and Lucky
Luciano, two notorious mobsters, at the Waldorf? Treading the same corridors as an
ex-president and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor? Is this conceivable? Yes, it is.
Thanks to prohibition and America’s craving for liquor, Bugsy Siegel by
1927, at the tender age of 21, was awash in cash and, to flaunt it, bought an
apartment at the Waldorf. We’ll assume
that management didn’t know who they were dealing with, and of course his money
was good. The same goes for Charles “Lucky”
Luciano, who in the early 1930s lived in room 39D in the luxurious Waldorf
Towers under the name Charles Ross, and looked very much the affluent
businessman, wearing custom-made suits and riding about in a chauffeur-driven
limousine. He held meetings of the mob
in his suite and was even photographed there with some of his cohorts. In 1936, when U.S. Attorney Thomas Dewey
tried him for operating a massive prostitution ring, the testimony of Waldorf
employees about him and his associates at the Waldorf was devastating to his
defense and helped bring about his conviction. (More of this in a forthcoming post.) And in his later years yet another gangster, Frank Costello, got his
haircut and manicure regularly at the hotel’s barber shop.
Another eminent guest was General Douglas
MacArthur who, returning to this country in 1951, was lodged with his second
wife and their only child in a suite in the Waldorf Towers. So it was from this exclusive address that
his son Arthur MacArthur issued daily to attend classes at Columbia College,
where he was in the second-year French class that I was teaching in 1957. A sensitive 19-year-old with an excellent
accent in French that must have been acquired through private tutoring, he sat
apart from the other male students. Remembering
photos of him at a very young age with his mother and his Chinese amah in
Australia, where they went following their escape with the General from the
besieged Philippines in 1942, I sensed that, through no fault of his own, he
had been too much in the company of women and needed more contact with boys his
own age. His parents resided at the
Waldorf from 1952 until 1964, the year of the General’s death, and his mother
continued there until her death.
(A
brief digression regarding Arthur MacArthur:
With his father in charge of the war in the South Pacific, at age 4 his
photo had appeared on the cover of the Life
magazine of August 3, 1942, and prior to that he had been photographed
repeatedly with his father. After the
General’s death in 1964 he moved out of the Waldorf to another part of
Manhattan and changed his name, so as to creep out from under the burden of an
illustrious heritage. His father had
wanted him to go to West Point, but he was drawn to music, literature, the arts,
and theater. For decades he simply
vanished from sight, probably glad to escape the publicity that, as a son and
grandson of renowned generals, had so oppressed him and kept him from living a
life of his own. Then, just last year,
it was reported that Arthur MacArthur, who would now be 76, was one of four reclusive
tenants in rent-controlled apartments in the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park
West who were given lavish sums by a developer to move out. Arthur MacArthur is said to be living now in
Greenwich Village, which, if true, makes him a neighbor of mine. I wish him well in his anonymity.)
Lavish dinners, business conferences, and
fund-raising galas have been held at the Waldorf. Prominent among them was the annual April in
Paris Ball (later moved to October), which, in the words of an organizer, catered
to “very, very high-class people” and raffled off prizes like a chinchilla
coat, a Ford Thunderbird car, 25 cases of expensive French wines, a pedigree
poodle, and other goodies, with earnings going to French and American
charities. Unique among hotels, it also became
involved in world affairs, hosting international conferences and secret
meetings of statesmen and other figures of prominence, and receiving
controversial foreign leaders requiring the highest level of security.
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| Society hostess Elsa Maxwell whispering to Marilyn Monroe at the April in Paris Ball, 1957. There's a story here; it will be told in a future post. |
A
1949 conference, held at the Waldorf to discuss the emerging the Cold War in
hopes of promoting peace, was attended by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey
Vyshinsky, composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Albert
Einstein, and others, but was climaxed by Shostakovich’s outburst in front
of 800 people asserting that “a small clique of hatemongers are preparing world
public opinion for the transition from cold war to outright aggression.” Anti-Stalinist activists picketed outside, flaunting signs saying NIET
TOVARICH! (no comrade!) and SHOSTAKOVICH! JUMP THRU THE WINDOW, while prominent American literary figures denounced
Stalinism inside. Needless to say, the
Cold War continued unabated.
An international event of somewhat less
significance was the stay there of the British rock band The Who in 1968, when
a dispute with the hotel staff led to their being denied access to their
room. What prompted the Waldorf to
receive a band known for rowdy behavior and trashing hotel rooms is unclear,
but the band’s response was forthright and immediate: they blew the locked door
off its hinges with a cherry bomb and retrieved their luggage, following which
they were banned from the hotel for life – a ban later revoked when The Who were
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in a ceremony held at the Waldorf in
1990.
Though not a “very high-class people,”
back in my freelance editing days I used to obtrude my plebeian presence on
this storied edifice. Coming back from a
publisher on Third Avenue, I would enter the Waldorf on Lexington Avenue and
walk the length of the arcade, lined with pricey boutiques, that leads to the
elegant Park Avenue lobby. There I would
usually linger for a few moments, enjoying the music from the plucked strings
of a harp on a mezzanine above. Most of
the people traversing the lobby seemed totally unaware of the music and hurried
on, but I and a few others savored it, grateful for the surprising presence of
the woman harpist who sent these gentle sounds wafting down to us below. A harpist lodged above a hotel lobby: once
again, the Waldorf was unique.
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| The Waldorf lobby. All this and harp music, too. Alan Light |
And who owns the Waldorf today? From 1972 on, Conrad Hilton, but as of
October 2014, the Anbang Insurance Group of China, who acquired it for $1.95
billion, the highest price ever paid for a hotel. So the legendary Waldorf Astoria, like the
Plaza, is foreign-owned today.
Note on J.P. Morgan: Once again I must come to the defense of J.P.
Morgan Chase, my beloved candy-dispensing bank, whom the government just won’t
let alone. Targeted by an anti-trust
lawsuit accusing 12 major banks of rigging prices in the foreign-exchange
market, it has agreed to pay $99.5 million to settle its portion of the
suit. And this on top of a $1 billion
settlement to resolve claims by U.S. and European regulators last
November! To top it off, the New York Times article reporting the
latest settlement reads as follows:
JPMorgan
To Pay Out
$99 Million
Over Graft
Not only is this unsporting
of the Times, to hit a man when he’s
down, but referring to the matter as “graft” is worthy of the lowest, meanest,
nastiest, most sensationalist tabloid.
Let the Newspaper of Record take note: It wasn’t graft, it was profit
enhancement.
Notes on Al Sharpton and friends:
1. A viewer of this blog informs me that Al Sharpton
may have had surgery to reduce his girth.
He denies it, but some medical sources confirm it. (See last week’s post #164 on Al Sharpton.)
2. Another viewer of this blog informs me that,
back during the Tawana Brawley controversy, he heard attorneys Alton H. Maddox
and C. Vernon Mason tell a WNYC interviewer that Attorney Steven Pagones was in
the habit of taking out photos of Tawana and “massabatin.” At first he wondered if he heard this remark
right, but when the station did an end-of-the-year roundup of the big stories
of the year, he heard the remark repeated.
Both attorneys, he further informs me, have since been disbarred.
Coming soon: More on great hotels: the hotel that hosted
the “Vicious Circle”; the hotel whose manager terrorized the staff; budget
hotels; the super modern hotel that to my eye looks clunky; and the hotel where
you shouldn’t attempt suicide, and why.
Also: How did Franklin Delano Roosevelt get to his Waldorf suite without
being seen by the public? And what is
the weirdest request ever made by a guest at the Waldorf Towers, and what did
the Waldorf do about it?
©
2015 Clifford Browder
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