The Waldorf Astoria is going the lamentable way of the Plaza
By RALPH GARDNER JR.
July 4, 2016 7:04 p.m. ET
There oughta be a law! To prevent our grand hotels from being turned into condos, that is.
News of the latest victim came from my colleague Craig Karmin, who reported last week in The Wall Street Journal that China’s Anbang Insurance Group, which owns the Waldorf Astoria, is planning to close the hotel for up to three years. When it reopens, the majority of the rooms will be condos. The current 1,413-room hotel will shrink to between 300 and 500 guest rooms.
While math was never my forte, by my count this leaves New York with zero crown jewels—in the classic sense of the Savoy in London or the Ritz in Paris.
There were at least two in recent memory. The other hotel that deserved that designation was the Plaza. But have you visited the Plaza lately? The landmark interiors are as they always were, but something is missing.
Energy. An energy peculiar to a palatial five-star hotel, where architecture and design, pomp and circumstance, meet to create live theater; the players are each of us—from guests to staff to rubberneckers—who cross its threshold.
“The lobby, the Palm Court, the Oak Room all became landmarks,” explained Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the city’s architecturally significant buildings. “Even though there is a store in the Edwardian Room, the store can come out without damaging anything.”
That’s excellent news, I suppose. The problem is that the Edwardian Room—with its soaring ceilings, huge windows overlooking Central Park South and Grand Army Plaza, and stenciled woodwork—is a store at all. The one and only time I visited recently the view was obscured by cabinets filled with high-end men’s furnishings.
I recall the excitement of being taken there for lunch as a child by my father and trying my first Shirley Temple as horse-drawn carriages loitered by the sidewalk. You didn’t need to be an architecture critic to know you were someplace august.
As a teenager, Trader Vic’s in the Plaza’s basement—with its tiki bar, Mai Tai’s and pu pu platters—stirred similar excitement. The hotel specialized in generating instant memories.
If there’s a definition of an iconic urban space—at least one of its definitions—perhaps it’s a destination that casts a straight line from past to present to future. Walking down Fifth Avenue, as much as it’s changed over the years, you feel a connection to the crowds that filled that boulevard in the 1930s and ’40s and hopefully will a hundred years from now.
You have a similar feeling entering the Waldorf Astoria from Park Avenue and mounting the stairs to the lobby, with its famous ornate central clock. You may as well have stepped into a movie set. Turn a corner and you half expect to bump into such former guests and residents as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter and Princess Grace.
The effect is even more profound at the Plaza, its walls breathing history—F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald partying there in the Roaring Twenties; the Beatles’ first visit in 1964 with hordes of hysterical fans straining against police barricades; Truman Capote’s 1966 “Black and White Ball” in the Grand Ballroom.
These days, the Plaza feels like the victim of some genteel version of a neutron bomb—the property remains intact but the people are largely missing. “You look at the side of the Plaza where the condos are; you don’t see a lot of light,” at night, Ms. Breen acknowledged.
Her advice is that the public make noise, such as it did with the Plaza: Let the Anbang Group know how important the Waldorf’s interior public spaces, which aren’t landmarked, even though the exterior is, are to New Yorkers. “I hope if they realize how beautiful the public spaces are, the collective memories they hold for New Yorkers,” they’ll embrace landmark designation, she said. “It’s crucial to who we are as a city.”
But interior landmark designation is still a Pyrrhic victory as far as I’m concerned. The only way truly to protect the hotel is for it to remain a hotel, all of it. “Landmarks doesn’t really control use,” Ms. Breen told me.
Aren’t there enough shiny new billionaire condo developments rising along 57th Street and Central Park South to satisfy demand? Must we squander our inheritance?
While I’m a believer in private property, especially my own, over time some private property becomes communal property. If Paris and London can cherish their grand hotels, why can’t we?
— ralph.gardner@wsj.com