Plaza Hotel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 19-story luxury hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South in Manhattan, currently closed and undergoing renovations. Its main entrance faces the southern portion of Grand Army Plaza— commemorating the Army of the Union in the Civil War. Grand Army Plaza is in two sections, bisected by Central Park South. The section in front of the Plaza Hotel is centered by the Pulitzer Fountain, of Abundance by Karl Bitter, funded by the will of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer: the statue in the fountain is actually Pomona, Roman goddess of fruits and nuts. The north side of Grand Army Plaza, a cutout from Central Park, has the glorious Augustus Saint-Gaudens part-gilded bronze equestrian statue of General Sherman. Grand Army Plaza provided the original main entrance to the carriage drives of Central Park.
On the south side of the Plaza (between 57th and 58th Streets) once stood the French Renaissance château of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, designed by George Browne Post; rising behind its gated front court, it was the grandest of the Fifth Avenue mansions of the Gilded Age.
The Plaza is the second hotel of that name on the site. The French Renaissance château-style building was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and opened to the public in October 1907.
The Plaza was accorded landmark status by New York City's Landmark Commission in 1969 and is the only New York City hotel to be designated as a National Historic Landmark. In the 1950s it was the setting for Kay Thomspson's series of Eloise books, Eartha Kitt and Peggy Lee played the Persian Room, unaccompanied ladies were not permitted in the Oak Room bar and the Palm Court was favored for luncheons and teas.
On November 28, 1966, in honor of publisher Katharine Graham, Truman Capote hosted his acclaimed "Black & White Ball" in the Grand Ballroom. |
Recent history
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Donald Trump bought the Plaza for $407½ million in 1988. Trump commented on his purchase in a full-page open letter he had published in The New York Times:
I haven't purchased a building, I have purchased a masterpiece — the Mona Lisa. For the first time in my life, I have knowingly made a deal that was not economic — for I can never justify the price I paid, no matter how successful the Plaza becomes.
Trump sold it for $325 million in 1995 to a partnership between Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Millennium & Copthorne Hotels. They sold it in 2004 for $675 million to Manhattan developer, Elad Properties. The Plaza closed on April 30, 2005, to undergo extensive renovation and is projected to reopen in early 2007. When the renovations are complete, the Plaza will have 282 hotel rooms, including 152 condo hotel units and be managed by Fairmont Hotels and Resorts. |
Movie backdrop
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Although the hotel had appeared briefly in earlier films, it made its major movie debut in the 1959 film North by Northwest. It was also a setting for Barefoot in the Park (1967), Funny Girl (1968), Plaza Suite (1971), The Way We Were (1973), Love at First Bite (1979), Cotton Club (1984), the first two Crocodile Dundee movies, King of New York (1990), Home Alone 2: Lost In New-York (1992), and Inside the Osmonds (2001), and several episodes of "The Sopranos," most notably "The Test Dream," (season 5, episode 11) in which much of the episode occurs in a suite at the Plaza.
Eloise at the Plaza books and movies are set here as well. |
External links and references
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* National Historic Landmark listing
* The Plaza Hotel, from the website of a former New York Post architecture critic
* The Plaza: How it was Sold, a December 2004 article from a NYC real estate website
* The Plaza Says It'll Be History After April 30, a March 2005 New York Times article (registration required)
* The Plaza Lives! - an oral history of the Plaza Hotel that appeared in New York magazine in May 2005.
* Fairmont to manage New York City's Plaza Hotel - CBC News report.
* The Plaza Hotel - New York Architecture Images
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