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Hotel History: The Pierre Hotel (1930); Nothing Like Home: Designing the Hotel Experience;
My Service as an Expert Witness; Quote of the Month
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Hotel History: The Pierre Hotel (1930); Nothing Like Home: Designing the Hotel Experience;
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By Stanley Turkel, CMHS, ISHC
May 1, 2013 1. Hotel
History: The Pierre Hotel (1930) 5th Avenue and 61st
Street Designed by Schultze & Weaver (who also designed the Waldorf-Astoria and the Sherry-Netherland in New York and the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida), the 42-floor, 714-room Pierre offered very large suites and 200 transient rooms. During the Depression, the Pierre went into
bankruptcy in 1932
and was bought six years later by oilman J. Paul Getty for $2.5 million. In 1958, Getty converted the Pierre into a
cooperative and subsequently sold some of the hotel's suites to the
likes of
Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor. Soon
thereafter, the Pierre Roof ballroom was closed because the new
coop-owners did
not want to wait for elevator service when the rooftop ballroom was in
use. For some 30 years, the ballroom was
used for storage of old hotel files, furniture, equipment and for an
upholstery
shop. In 1990, the coop board decided to renovate the 41st, 42nd and 43rd floors and in 1993 sold them for $12 million to Lady Mary Fairfax, an Australian media heiress whose husband had recently died. Lady Fairfax hired the design firm of Balamotis McAlpine Associates to create a stunning palace in the sky. They installed an 18-foot high limestone fireplace and mantle (originally from a French chateau) at the east end of 75' x 46' x 23' Grand Salon. Lady Fairfax told me that the chandelier was salvaged from a demolished Melbourne, Australia theater. Some six years later, Lady Fairfax sold the triplex to investment banker Martin Zweig for $21.5 million, then a record. Mr. Zweig and his wife moved into the penthouse with their museum-quality collection of popular culture memorabilia. They displayed guitars and performance attire of major rock musicians from Hendrix to Clapton to Springsteen as well as team jerseys of sports icons Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretsky. The penthouse provides 360-degree views of Manhattan, Central Park, the Hudson and East Rivers and beyond. When Mr. Zweig died in February at age 70, the penthouse was put on the market at a price that reflects its unique qualities. Disclosure: I
served
for six years as Executive Vice President of the 795 Fifth Avenue
Corporation,
the Pierre's owning entity, to help oversee the then-lessee, Four
Seasons
Hotels and Resorts and make certain that service was impeccable for the
73
coop-owners. 2. Nothing
Like Home: Designing the Hotel
Experience
It has been the subject of at
least eight
books, featured in
dozens of others, praised frequently in newspaper columns and magazine
articles. It is nothing like home.
For a start: No hotel lobby in America is so haunted by literary ghosts as New York's venerable Algonquin. And, in fact, there isn't any lobby. There's a lounge, a casual place to sit and talk, where sofas and chairs snuggle together around tables, each equipped with a bell. Tap the bell, and a waiter appears, to fetch liquids for freshening the conversation. It's difficult to exorcise such outrageous ghosts of the Algonquin Round Table of the '20s and '30s like Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker who mingle with creative souls like Norman Mailer, Neil Simon, Sir Laurence Olivier, Yves Montand, Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson. And by film makers ̶ Godard, Truffault, Costa-Gavras. And Supreme Court justices and Ella Fitzgerald and Peter Ustinov. Believe it not, the Algonquin Round Table was deliberately created by the hotel's first general manager, Frank Case who, in order to attract paying guests, subsidized young actors, playwrights and authors to eat lunch at the Algonquin which is located in the heart of the theater district. Ultimately, some of those artists became famous and the Algonquin has benefitted for more than 111 years. Case, who later became the owner, wrote two books called "Tales of a Wayward Inn" and "Do Not Disturb". A note on "designing for the hotel experience". Even after a recent renovation, the Algonquin looks venerable because its guests are opposed to change. It has looked virtually the same for more than a century.
The Ansonia Hotel was built as a
luxury
apartment hotel on
the upper west side of New York in 1904 and it was nothing like home. Its resplendent apartments contained multiple
bedrooms, parlors, libraries and formal dining rooms with high
ceilings,
elegant moldings and bay windows. The
hotel had a central kitchen, serving pantries on every floor so that
residents
could enjoy meals prepared by professional chefs. Although
a standard housekeeping suite
provided a kitchen and accommodation for one or two live-in servants,
half the
apartments did not have kitchens. Its
exterior turrets, balconies, carvings, scrolls, medallions and moldings
made
the Ansonia a Beaux-Arts confection.
Inside and out, the Ansonia was a theatrical building. Behind the curves and cornices were apartments with oval reception rooms or immense circular parlors, ellipsoidal living and dining rooms, a bedroom with an apse; on higher floors, there were apartments with panoramic views. All the apartments were heated and cooled by a unique method of air circulation, supplied with filtered hot, cold, and ice water, and equipped with the gadgets of the latest technology. Maid service and room service were available, as well as a hotel-like inventory of towels, napkins, dishes, silver (polished once a month by the staff), light bulbs, soap, and stationery. It opened with 2500 rooms, 400 full baths and 600 additional toilets and sinks (one of the largest plumbing contracts in history), a banquet hall, grand ballroom, cafe, tearoom, English grill, a 500-seat dining room, writing rooms, a palm court, a Turkish bath, the world's largest indoor swimming pool and a lobby fountain with live seals. The Ansonia was built by William Earle Dodge Stokes, the Phelps-Dodge copper heir and it was named for his grandfather, the industrialist Anson Greene Phelps. He imported a French architect, Paul E. M. Duboy, best known as the architect of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on Riverside Drive, to design the grandest hotel in Manhattan. Standard guestroom furnishings included specially-woven Persian carpets; ivy patterned "art glass" windows and domed chandeliers inset with mosaic tiles. When it officially opened on April 19, 1904, The Ansonia was "the monster of all residential hotel buildings" according to the New York World. In what might be the earliest harbinger of the current developments in urban farming, Stokes established a small farm on the roof of the hotel. He had a Utopian vision for the Ansonia ̶ that it could be self-sufficient, or at least contribute to its own support ̶ which led to perhaps the strangest New York hotel amenity ever: "The farm on the roof." As Stokes wrote years later, it "included about 500 chickens, many ducks, about six goats and a small bear." Every day, a bellhop delivered free fresh eggs to the tenants, and any surplus was sold cheaply to the public in the basement arcade. Not much about this feature charmed the city fathers, however, and in 1907 the Department of Health shut it down. 3. My Service as an Expert Witness Since 1992, I have served as an expert consultant and/or witness in 35 hotel-related law suits. Those cases involved the following subjects: 1) hurricane damage and business interruption claims 2) franchisor/franchisee disputes 3) management contract disagreements 4) wrongful deaths 5) fire and other catastrophes 6) slip and fall accidents. As you know, a knowledgeable hotel expert can provide an attorney with thorough research, expert and careful report writing, compelling testimony and indispensable litigation support assistance. Don't hesitate to contact me for any hotel-related case at www.stanleyturkel.com. 4. Quote of the
Month "Real equality is going to come not when a
female
Einstein is recognized as quickly as a male Einstein, but when a female
schlemiel is promoted as quickly as male schlemiel." U.S. Congresswoman New York
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| Contact: Stanley Turkel, CMHS, ISHC 917-628-8549 [email protected] www.stanleyturkel.com
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