Ode to the Plaza Hotel

Perched large and soaring on the crisp, spacious, green-fringed corner of 59^th and 5^th is The Plaza hotel. The Plaza! Do you remember it? It was built in 1906, full of gorgeous nooks and crannies, by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in his signature florid, Beaux-Arts Parisian style and was quite a confection: Gilded ceilings, marble walls, carved, polished bronze fittings, exaggerated rococo garnishes on everything. Big, but not big-big and oppressive like The Waldorf, there were exactly 800 guest rooms, suites and half-suites of all sorts of splendor. Just about every magnificent, spectacular, stellar, saucy person you could possibly think of spun through that glossy team of plate-glass doors and called it home, sweet home for a while. Or at least got drunk at the Oak Bar now and again.

I adore the Plaza. It is the Elizabeth Taylor of hotels. Due to an obsessive period in my sophomore year of high school, I have every corner of it laid out in my brain like an etched-out treasure map: Perched large and soaring on the crisp, spacious, green-fringed corner of 59^th and 5^th, it was built in 1906 by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in his signature florid, Beaux-Arts Parisian style. Gilded ceilings, marble walls, carved, polished bronze fittings, exaggerated rococo garnished everything. Big, but not big-big and oppressive like The Waldorf, there were exactly 800 guest rooms, suites and half-suites of all sorts of splendor. Just about every magnificent, stellar person you could possibly think of spun through that glossy team of plate-glass doors and called it home for a while.

Liz and Dick always stayed there when they bombed into NYC like a couple of glamorous, drunk greek gods, had their own private set of five connected suites—one whole one for her wardrobe. Whenever they checked two bottles each of Dom Perignon, Beefeater Gin, and, well I don’t remember the list exactly, it was EXTENSIVE, and DETAILED and HUMONGOUS, was to be  laid out on ice for them, and to be refreshed daily. As in new bottle every day, people. Every day!

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived there for a spell, and it was where he wrote his crazy pretentious memoirs, A King’s Story, while the immaculate Walli swanned around doing god knows what, perfectly.

A random sampling of anecdotes: When it first opened it’s doors, Papa Vanderbilt (Im calling him papa because I don’t remember exactly which one it was—some big daddy type) kept his mistress here, while his wife lived literally a BLOCK away in the building that was to become Bergdorf Goodman. People were so RICH back then! She lived in BERGDORF GOODMAN. My god.  And then in 1920, Zelda Fitzgerald, who lived with Scott in the Biltmore but drank at the Plaza, got wasted on too much gin and jumped into the Hastings fountain out front, and splashed around in her brand new Jean Patou dress. Crazy lady! The Beatles took over an entire wing on the 15^th floor in 1964, when they held that famous press conference (the one you’re always seeing flashbacks of on television) in the Persian Room.  When it got dark out, the four of them would sneak out to the Playboy club, which was around the block back then.

Truman Capote’s masked Black and White ball, a.k.a. “The Party of the Century”—an event so big and illustrious, I cannot even begin to start­you really should just go out and buy that great book on it, read about it in there—was held in the Palm Court on November 28, 1966, and John Knowles described as being like Versailles, 1788, which I though was a lovely, writerly way of putting it.