Waldorf-Astoria, Pierre, St. Regis: NY Hotels
Historic New York Hotels That Have the Mystique of Age and Fame
Jul 15, 2008
New York’s historic hotels tend to be have been built between 1900 to 1930, erected along 5th Ave. and Central Park South, and designed in the Beaux Arts style of the French Renaissance by architects such as Schultze & Weaver, who designed the Waldorf-Astoria, and McKim, Mead and White, who made a name with major spaces like Pennsylvania Station, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Madison Square Garden.
In a strange historical footnote, Stanford White was actually shot and killed on the roof of his own building, the Madison Square Roof Garden, by a jealous husband.
Waldorf-Astoria
Essentially unchanged since it opened in 1893 -- except that it's no longer in the spot now taken up by the Empire State Building -- is the Waldorf-Astoria(50th St. and Park Ave.), whose 1896 maitre d' created the apple, walnut, celery and mayonnaise concoction known as the Waldorf salad.
Paris and Nikki Hilton were raised in one of the private suites in the Waldorf Towers. The 1945 movie “Weekend at the Waldorf” was set here and starred Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner and Robert Benchley, famous as a member in good standing of the Vicious Circle at another historic New York hotel, the Algonquin Hotel.
St. Regis
The St. Regis (55th St. and 5th Ave), built in 1904 and one of the stalwarts of the debutante circuit, nurtured a long-term musical tradition, beginning in the 1930s when Eddy Duchin’s orchestra played at the Maisonette, and continuing in the 1960s with his son Peter, whose orchestra played in the King Cole room.
Today, the Maisonette is a meeting room. The King Cole room was the five-star, five-diamond Lespinasse restaurant until the restaurant closed several years ago. Starwood Hotels owns and manages the property currently.
Marlene Dietrich, William and Babe Paley, and Salvador Dali all lived in the hotel, the first in New York with an air-cooling system. John Jacob Astor IV commissioned the hotel as a place to put up visiting guests. He later died on the Titanic.
The Pierre and the Sherry-Netherland
Two historic New York hotels, the Pierre (61st St. and 5th Ave.) and the Sherry-Netherland (59th St. and 5th Ave.), share restaurateur Louis Sherry as a link.
Sherry developed the Sherry-Netherland in 1927 (the lobby has wall sculptures from the long-razed Vanderbilt mansion) and he was once the employer of Charles Pierre, who worked for him for nearly a decade at Sherry’s.
Pierre went on to raise $15 million from a consortium of Sherry’s regulars — including E.F. Hutton, Walter Chrysler and Robert Livingston Gerry — in order to open the Hotel Pierre in 1930 on the site of Gerry’s mansion.
Pierre must have liked the looks of the Sherry-Netherland, because The Pierre commissioned the same architects. During the Depression, J. Paul Getty bought the Pierre at the fire-sale price of $2 million and sold some of the rooms as condominiums to buyers such as Elizabeth Taylor.
The Four Seasons chain renovated the hotel after buying it in 1981, and in 2005 The Pierre became part of the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces chain. Today, the Sherry-Netherland’s restaurant is not Sherry’s but Cipriani.
The spirit, or rather spirits, of Charles Pierre live on in the eponymous martini available at the bar of the Pierre, where Mick Jagger, Barbara Walters and Dolly Parton are all said to be regulars.
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