Plaza Hotel

The Plaza Hotel in New York City.

The Plaza Hotel before 1908.

The Plaza Hotel (often referred to as The Plaza), located in Manhattan at 768 Fifth Avenue, is a luxury hotel and condominium apartment building. The hotel, completed in 1906, has gone through numerous changes of ownership and variations in profitability. In 1988 Donald Trump, using huge loans, bought The Plaza and put his first (not-yet-divorced) wife Ivana Trump in charge of renovating and managing the hotel. Trump sold the controlling stake to Kwek and Al-Waleed in April 1995. After two more changes of ownership, Katara Hospitality acquired full ownership of the Plaza Hotel in July 2018.
The Plaza building is designated by the U.S. government as a National Historic Landmark. In a November 1971 article published in The New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable, called the Plaza Hotel "New York's most celebrated symbol of cosmopolitan and turn-of-the-century splendor, inside and out."

Quotes

• There were few finer views in New York at mid-century than the panorama from Frank Lloyd Wright's second-floor corner suite at the Plaza Hotel. Beyond its tall arched windows facing Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, the city's premier green space, Central Park, stretched north in one unbroken 843-acre swath. Along the east side of the park stood prestigious residences and great cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and "Millionaires' Row," once home to a procession of opulent turn-of-the-century mansions built by some of New York's wealthiest families. To the south, fashionable department stores, and chic shops marched toward midtown. Thirty blocks to the north on Fifth Avenue, between East Eighty-Eighth and East Eighty-Ninth streets, stood the site upon which the Guggenheim Museum would soon begin to rise.
  Stunning views aside, the Plaza was an ideal location for Wright's Manhattan home base. The hotel's peerless address and tradition of excellence were well suited his rarified personal tastes and exacting standards. Above all, the Plaza was regarded by many as the finest hotel in a city of splendid hotels, and Wright had great affection for the building.
  • Jane King Hession and Debra Pickrel, Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-1959. Gibbs Smith. 2007. p. 16. ISBN 1423601017. 

• Work on the original Plaza Hotel began in 1883 using plans drawn up by architect George W. DeCunha. The builders ran out of money prior to completion. In 1888, New York Life foreclosed and brought in McKim, Mead, and White to redesign the interior. The eight story, 400 room Plaza opened in the fall of 1890 ... The demise of the "old" Plaza was decreed at the St. Regis one afternoon over lunch. ... The old hotel had too few rooms to generate sufficient cash flow. ...
  New York architect, Henry J. Hardenbergh, was retained to design the "new" Plaza Hotel. He opted for the new steel skeleton technology that had been used earlier by Harry Black, the hotel's co-owner, when he built the Flat Iron Building. The eighteen-story brick and marble French Renaissance-style Plaza Hotel cost over $12.5 million. The hotel had eight hundred rooms and five hundred baths when it opened in the fall of 1907. It had centrally controlled electric clocks and telephones in every room. The public area had crystal chandeliers, marble fireplaces and staircases, and no end of elegant appointments.
  • Jeff Hirsch, Manhattan Hotels, 1880-1920. Volume 2 of Images of America: Manhattan series. Arcadia Publishing. 1997. pp. 12–13. ISBN 0752408437. 

• ... Growing up in New York, with teas at the Plaza from a very early age, my appreciation of the past and even my feeling for New York is undoubtedly conditioned by associations with that solid structure. I did not learn until years after those teas that the architect was Henry J. Hardenbergh and the date of its construction 1907, and that it was a high point of Edwardian design, inside and out. ...
  Although it is an official New York City landmark, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has jurisdiction only over what happens to its exterior. What is going on inside, where the interiors were of a piece, or to be more elegant, de l'epoque, is a kind of creeping, crawling bad taste in which even the authentic is being made to look fake.
  Through atrociously ill‐advised remodeling, touted as the hotel's entry into the 1970's, the Plaza is being adulterated to look and feel like any number of other older big city hotels of residual grandeur, cheapened with tricksy restaurants full of familiar and rather loathesome design gimmicks and arch menus and publicity to match.
  • Ada Louise Huxtable, (October 31, 1971) "Architecture: If It’s Good, Leave It Alone". New York Times.

• In its eighty-plus years, the Plaza has had seven owners. The United States Realty and Improvement Company, whose George A. Fuller construction subsidiary built it, owned it until 1943. Conrad Hilton then ran it until 1953. The Boston industrialist A. M. Sonnabend owned it up to 1958; then Lawrence Wien, a New York lawyer and realty investor, had it fleetingly before Sonnabend repurchased it. The Westin Hotels chain ... took over the hotel in 1975 ... A partnership made of the Robert M. Bass Group of Fort Worth, Texas, and the Aoki Corporation bought it in January 1988 for about $300 million but barely had time to take a get-acquainted tour of the place before agreeing to sell it for a quick and handsome profit to the casino operator and real estate wheeler-dealer Donald Trump, who paid a rather exorbitant $390 million.
  • Sonny Kleinfeld, "Chapter 2". The Hotel: A Week in the Life of the Plaza. Open Road Media. 2014. ISBN 1480484709.  (1st edition 1989 — the reference to "eighty-plus years" refers to the 1989 date with respect to 1907)

• Originally built in 1907 and added to in 1921, the Plaza Hotel has long been one of the most famous hotels in the city. The 20-floor building rises 280 feet high. With its addition, it has 1,098 guest rooms and 12 elevators. ... the Plaza is located on Fifth Avenue between Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth Streets at the Grand Army Plaza, adjacent to the southeast corner of Central Park. It was designed by Henry Hardenbergh, who also created the famous Dakota apartment building on Central Park West where John Lennon lived. The Plaza Hotel has been seen in numerous movies and is the setting of the famous Eloise series of children's books. It was recently renovated and turned into a combination hotel/residential space.
  • Richard Panchyk, New York City Skyscrapers. Postcard History Series. Arcadia Publishing. 2010. p. 42. ISBN 1439638624. 

Inside the Plaza (2001)

• This new 18-story Plaza was indeed a skyscraper. Like the new 42-story Waldorf-Astoria when in was built at 50th and Park Avenue in 1931. The Plaza offered unobstructed views of both the East and Hudson Rivers. From the top of its mansard roof you had a wonderful view on clear moonlit nights of the torch of the Statue of Liberty far to the South in New York Harbor.
  • Ward Morehouse III, Inside the Plaza: An Intimate Portrait of the Ultimate Hotel. Hal Leonard Corporation. 2001. p. 28. ISBN 1557834687. 

• The oft-married American actress Lillian Russell, who became a household name in the 1890s for her delightful performances at “Lady Teazle” and other musical comedies of the day, was frequently a luncheon guest of Diamond Jim Brady at the Plaza. But she didn't come alone. She wheeled up to the hotel's Central Park South steps on her diamond-studded bicycle which a few years earlier had helps her shed nearly 30 pounds of her ample girth. She usually left her bejeweled bicycle with the doorman, who put it behind lock and key in a luggage room to the right of the 59th Street entrance.
  • p. 42 (See The School for Scandal.)

External links

• (September 24, 2020) "The Plaza Hotel New York City | An In Depth Look Inside". Details In Luxury, YouTube.
• (October 30, 2018) "Hidden Details of The Plaza Hotel, From Lobby to Penthouse | Architectural Digest". YouTube.