Plaza Hotel

From Wikicompany

The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 19-story hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South in Manhattan, currently closed and undergoing renovations. Its main entrance faces Grand Army Plaza— commemorating the Army of the Union in the Civil War— which 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 facing section supports Augustus Saint-Gaudens' part-gilded bronze equestrian statue of General Sherman. The Grand Army Plaza provided the original main entrance to the carriage drives of Central Park. On the south side of the Plaza once stood the French Renaissance ch�teau of William H. Vanderbilt, designed by William Morris Hunt; 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 ch�teau-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.

Recent history

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 Elad Properties, an Israeli development group. The Plaza closed on April 30, 2005, to undergo extensive renovation, converting all but about 150 of the rooms into high-class condos and retail stores.

Movie backdrop

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), and Home Alone 2: Lost In New-York (1992).

External links and references

• The Plaza Hotel, from the Fairmont Hotels and Resorts website
• 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.

Source

• The WPA Guide to New York City, 1939 (reprinted 1982) ISBN 0-394-71215-3

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