It’s Gatsby and Tom Buchanan skirmishing for the right to Daisy’s hand in F. Scott Fizgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). It’s Walter Matthau in Plaza Suite (1971), it’s Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park (1967), and again in The Way We Were (1973). It’s Macauley Culkin, and his predecessor Eloise, a Plaza resident at six-years-old. It’s the final years of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life. It’s the King of Morocco occupying the entire sixth floor, bringing with him 1269 pieces of luggage and enough incense to perfume the length of Central Park. It’s commotion in the Persian Room, it’s Bob Fosse cutting loose and Ethel Merman warbling her old standards. It’s history vivified. “It’s a continuity with the past, more than anything else, which lays hold upon the imagination at the mention of The Plaza,” remarked columnist Lucius Beebe upon the hotel’s 50th anniversary in 1957. “The world has grown grey… But the lights of The Plaza, somehow and miraculously, have been undimmed.”
Still “undimmed,” The Plaza Hotel remains an immovable beacon—a grand vestige of a New York that has evolved beyond The Plaza’s particular brand of high polish. There is more money in the city now than there has ever been, more “upscale living” and moneyed bravado, and yet, almost 120 years after it first opened its doors, The Plaza still holds court in the popular imagination as the quintessence of uptown luxury. Even peering through its front entrance has become a destination activity for tourists, offering them a glimpse of that ideal they’ve all heard so much about: Old New York.
“There’s something very haunting and magical about The Plaza,” remarked Donald Trump when he purchased the hotel in the late 1980s. “I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s like remnants of the old days.” Its appeal is as unchanging as the gables and loggias that mark its facade: a vision of timeless constancy, a beauty that doesn’t age. Of course, that agelessness is the product of a rolodex of assiduous, benevolent caretakers inspired into action by the hotel. Trump was merely one figure in this lineage. Consider, for instance, the two men who were employed solely to dust the hotel’s 1650 crystal chandeliers.
The Plaza was commissioned to replace a rather dull predecessor, built on the site of an ice-skating pond in the late 1890s. The first attempt at The Plaza, stale the second it opened, was torn down, and a new hotel was planned and erected under the auspices of a cohort of estimable, extremely wealthy men who, consciously or unconsciously, desired to erect a monument to the new reign of industrial capital they represented. One of the investors, Texaco founder John Gates, had begun his pursuit of wealth on a dusty Illinois farm and amassed a fortune exceeding $100 million. For that genre of parvenu, The Plaza was the place. Gates took up a suite, which he designed himself, at a yearly rent of $46,000—well over $1million in today’s money. Perhaps it is appropriate here to note that the hotel’s front steps open onto the Pulitzer Fountain, which depicts Pomona, the Roman goddess of abundance.
Already in its first public advertisement in September 1907, The Plaza was branding itself as “The World’s Most Luxurious Hotel.” All manner of extravagances were encouraged. $3 million was set aside for the linen alone, which was imported from a workshop in Ireland. The crystal came from France, the lace from Switzerland, and Savonnerie rugs were ordered from Les Gobelins in Paris. Shortly after it opened, it was occupied by a majority cohort of “permanents,” almost all of whom were figures whose own tendency for excess seemed perfectly suited to a hotel that worshipped Pomona. Gates was one; another was a Hungarian heiress, supposedly a “princess” of some obscure line, who arrived complete with a butler, an attaché, two wolves, a dog, an ibis, a falcon, a few owls, and a group of alligators who, one assumes, took up residence in the porcelain bath.
The Plaza’s profile only continued to rise. Soon, the grand ballroom was hosting high-rolling auctions of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and John Singer Sargent paintings. Presidents and belletrists, actors and hommes d’affaires: the full spectrum of the elite seemed almost centrifugally drawn to that corner of 59th and 5th. In late 1953, within the span of a few weeks, The Plaza welcomed Greer Garson, Cary Grant, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Orson Welles, and Norman Rockwell. The rooms they frequented—the Oak, the Persian, and, of course, the Palm Court—became legendary. The 1960s cranked the legend up a notch. First came the arrival of The Beatles on their 1964 American tour. They commanded 15 rooms and a lavish quantity of chocolate and cola. When word got out that they were staying at the hotel, a small army was hired to keep fans out of the lobby. Then, in 1966, came Truman Capote’s Masked Ball—perhaps still the most infamous night in The Plaza ballroom’s history. Capote seemed to sense the rightness of the location for an event so fabled. “I wanted it at The Plaza,” he said, “because I think it’s the only really beautiful ballroom left in the United States.”
Inspiring such ardour, The Plaza has needed almost continuous renewal. In the 1970s, as New York teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, The Plaza, dutifully in tune with its city, started showing cracks. Too much fondness and too much frenzy had opened fissures in the ceiling; the lavish faucets were leaky. In the hotel’s hour of desperation, it was realised just what it might mean to leave The Plaza’s fate to the whims of time. “You know,” Bette Davis once told an inquiring journalist, “they’ve tried very hard to get rid of The Plaza. That would be the end of New York!”
The owners agreed, restorations soon began and seemingly haven’t stopped.. At one point, restorers stripped back 16 layers of paint to get to the original copper window frames, which is what everyone, in a way, has always been doing at The Plaza. Behind these layers, beneath the white-brick exterior and the mansard roof that towers over the statue of Pomona, lies an idea, the lure of an image. This is what those prone to magical thinking have always adored about it. The magic that The Plaza arouses isn’t dependent on the fluctuating guest list; it is intrinsic to the place itself.
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