At the Plaza Read online

  The Ballroom was witness to many gala events, beginning with the first formal dinner held there (here), a fifteen-dollar-a-plate, ten-course affair thrown by the Pilgrims of America in honor of the Lord Bishop of London. The Lord Bishop had recently beaten President Theodore Roosevelt in a game of tennis, and he got a laugh from the crowd when he crowed about it during his after-dinner remarks.

  This original Ballroom was situated on the northwest corner of the building, just above the Oak Room, and soon proved to be too small for the burgeoning social scene. When The Plaza expanded in 1921, a larger version was constructed as part of the Fifty-eighth Street addition. The original model was eventually subdivided into two separate floors, which today house the Baroque Room and, above it, the general manager’s office.

  The Plaza and the Taxicab

  New York’s first motorized taxi fleet made its debut on city streets the same day The Plaza did—October 1, 1907—a date most carefully selected by the fleet’s owner, Harry Allen, to take full advantage of the hotel’s coattails. With much fanfare, Allen’s twenty-five-car fleet was paraded up Fifth Avenue to The Plaza, where the taxis were parked around the perimeter. Photographs were taken (here and here) and Plaza patrons were given free rides for the day.

  Allen’s “auto-cars”—painted red and sporting a green stripe for easy identification—were driven by chauffeurs dressed like hussars and came equipped with a revolutionary “taximeter,” a device that allowed riders to monitor the progress of their fare. At first, drivers of hansom cabs dismissed their motorized competition as a novelty that would soon pass, but the taxicab’s growing success soon made them uneasy. Tempers flared, reaching their peak one morning in the winter of 1909, when Allen was having breakfast in the Men’s Cafe at The Plaza. Shots rang out from the park, shattering a window but fortunately missing their target. Though the gunman was never apprehended, Allen got the message. He sold his business, which then numbered over six hundred cars.

  The hansom cabs faded away to a mere handful, hanging on only as a quaint tourist attraction and limited to travel through Central Park. Ironically enough, one of the few sites where they can still be hailed is at The Plaza, where their demise was first foreseen.

  Here, an advertisement for the fleet from a hotel trade journal.

  The Cornelius Vanderbilt Mansion

  Directly south of The Plaza stood the mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, grandson of the famed Commodore Vanderbilt, the patriarch of this spectacularly wealthy family. Modeled loosely after the French Château du Blois, the blockwide home lay along the Fifth Avenue corridor known as Vanderbilt Row, and it went up in two stages: The initial dwelling facing Fifty-seventh Street was completed in 1882, followed by the addition of a carriage entrance in 1892 along Fifty-eighth Street (shown here). This huge house employed thirty servants, whose main occupation seemed to be keeping it dust-free. Vanderbilt’s sentiments about the arrival of The Plaza are unrecorded, but he must have given some tacit approval, as his son Alfred was the hotel’s first guest.

  The mansion was demolished in 1927 and replaced by the Bergdorf Goodman department store. Among items salvaged from it were an elaborate marble fireplace (today part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the iron gates shown here, which were transplanted uptown to the city’s Conservatory Gardens.

  Here, a circa 1910 view, looking up Fifth Avenue and showing the Fifty-seventh Street facade of the mansion (left of center) with The Plaza looming behind it.

  The Sherman Monument

  For nearly a century, the equestrian statue of the Civil War’s renowned Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman has stood guard over the plaza in front of the hotel. Dedicated on May 30, 1903, it is the second-oldest structure extant in this neighborhood (preceded only by the Metropolitan Club of 1894), and among the most well-regarded works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of America’s leading sculptors at the time. William Tecumseh Sherman, as the work is titled, had been in progress since 1888 (when Sherman himself posed for the head) and was completed in 1903. The finished work depicts the Union army hero being led into battle by Victory, personified by a young woman bearing a palm branch; its polished granite pedestal was designed by Charles McKim of the noted New York architectural firm McKim, Mead and White.

  Sherman’s monument was originally intended to be placed in front of Grant’s Tomb, but Grant’s family objected, not wanting his grave to be upstaged by another general. A Times Square site was discussed and rejected, while Saint-Gaudens himself prevailed for a park setting—and finally got one on the southeast corner of Central Park. At the artist’s direction, the bronze figure was given a coat of gold leaf, which quickly eroded (as it appears to have already done in the photo here, though it is more apparent in the postcard here). When the gilding was reapplied in the late 1980s, a great hue and cry arose over the statue’s glitzy new look, yet this was Saint-Gaudens’s intention: He was “sick of seeing statues look like stovepipes.”

  In 1916, the monument was integrated into the design of Grand Army Plaza and moved sixteen feet west to align it with the newly constructed Pulitzer Fountain.

  Enrico Caruso and the Magneta Clock

  The famed tenor was an early guest at The Plaza, arriving in November 1907 for his fourth consecutive season as a performer at the Metropolitan Opera. Caruso arrived with some trepidation, however, for his visit to the United States the previous year had been marked by two calamities: First, he had been caught in the nightmare of the San Francisco earthquake, and then, even worse, he was arrested in New York’s Central Park Zoo for allegedly pinching a woman in the monkey house. The charges had been dismissed after Caruso paid a ten-dollar fine, and his greatest fear—not being allowed back into the country the following season—proved groundless.

  He had no doubt chosen to stop at The Plaza because it was the talk of the town, having been open only one month at this point and much touted for its lavishness. His corner suite, although traditionally appointed, was subtly up-to-date, with a telephone in every room, buzzers that summoned maids and waiters, and a Magneta clock on the fireplace mantel. Considered a state-of-the-art instrument at the time, the Magneta was known for its absolute accuracy, as all the clocks were wired to a master unit in the telephone room. The price of this precision was a low hum, unheard by the average ear.

  Caruso did not have the average ear, however, and on December 8, all 245 of the Magneta clocks in the house stopped simultaneously when he attacked the one in his room with a knife (some accounts suggest a shoe or a suitcase as his weapon) in order to silence it. Management’s reaction was swift: They sent Caruso a magnum of champagne and a letter of apology; “accidents” were handled differently in those days. These tokens apparently did little good, for when Caruso returned to the city the following season, he took up residence at the Knickerbocker Hotel, which he patronized for the next twelve years.

  The souvenir booklet illustration here depicts the singer as Canio in I Pagliacci, his most famous role. The Magneta clock advertisement (here) comes from the trade journal Hotel Review.

  The Postcard Craze and The Plaza

  Amania for collecting and sending picture postcards swept America in the first decade of the twentieth century, taking The Plaza along with it. The craze was some time in coming. The first (pictureless) government-issued postcards were introduced in 1873, followed by cards illustrated with scenes from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, yet the populace took little notice. It was not until the passing of the Private Mailing Card Act of 1898—which gave private manufacturers the right to publish and sell their own cards—that the floodgates opened. Postcards took the country by storm, with the fad reaching its peak by 1908, when nearly 700 million postcards were mailed in the United States (whose population at the time was about 89 million). By far the most popular subjects were scenic views, and in New York City, The Plaza was much depicted, being a grand new source of civic pride.

  Most postcards were printed in Germany, which virtuall
y monopolized the market due to its superior printing techniques. Plates were made from black-and-white photographs that were then hand-colored by German artisans, who had never actually seen their subjects, which explains the varying hues of the hotel illustrated here. Many cards also titled the hotel the “New Plaza” to differentiate it from its predecessor.

  The postcard craze abated around the time of World War I, diminished by the abrupt unavailability of German printers and also by the introduction of the folded greeting card in 1913. Many of the turn-of-the-century postcards that survive today were never sent, proof that they were just as collectible then as now.

  Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy Adopts a Pet

  One of The Plaza’s more eccentric guests, Princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy, registered in 1908. Although history has forgotten her, the princess was quite a well-known figure of that era. Her title (and fortune) had been acquired after a brief marriage to a Russian prince, but she was famed as an accomplished portraitist, whose subjects included many of the crowned heads of Europe. In addition, she was also an early champion of animal rights, maintaining a menagerie in her château in the south of France. She had come to the United States to paint the country’s leading public figures, and originally planned to encamp at the Waldorf-Astoria, but was turned away. They did not allow pets. Instead, she took an expansive suite of rooms at the more animal-friendly Plaza, where, along with her pets, she was accompanied by a retinue that included a physician, several bodyguards, and a father confessor. To everyone’s surprise, she stayed for nearly five years.

  And her stay was not without incident. Soon after her arrival, the princess fell in love with a lion cub she spotted at the Ringling Brothers circus; she tried to buy it but was rebuffed. Determined to have it, she came up with a plan: One of her recent portraits depicted Civil War hero Gen. Daniel E. Sickles (also a figure of some renown at the time), and she convinced him to ask Ringling Brothers for the cub, knowing they would not refuse him. Her scheme worked, and Sickles, in turn, gave her the animal, which was named in his honor, although nicknamed “Goldfleck.” Somehow, Fred Sterry, The Plaza’s managing director, was persuaded to allow Goldfleck his own room in the hotel, although with a round-the-clock trainer close by. Inevitably, the cub managed to escape from his room one afternoon, and he roamed the hallways until he was coaxed back inside by some irresistible bait, a hunk of raw meat.

  Hotel living apparently didn’t suit Goldfleck, and the animal took sick and died in 1912. The princess was heartbroken, and after a private funeral ceremony in her quarters, Goldfleck was buried in the animal cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, where his tombstone (here) remains something of an attraction today. The princess (here) suffered a reversal of fortune at the onset of World War I and eventually relinquished her Plaza suite for more modest quarters on East Thirty-ninth Street, where she died in 1923.

  © Collection of the New York Historical Society

  The Plaza Lighted for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration

  A glorious burst of civic pride, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration captivated New Yorkers over a two-week period, which began on September 25, 1909. Although the festivities ostensibly honored two significant marine events—Henry Hudson’s discovery of the Hudson River in 1609 and Robert Fulton’s steamboat trip up the river in 1807—they really seemed an excuse to let off some patriotic steam.

  The city pulled out all the stops. Innumerable dinners, elaborate parades, special art exhibits, and nightly fireworks thrilled the populace. An armada of eight hundred vessels from around the world conducted maneuvers in the harbor. Wilbur Wright brought his aeroplane to New York and made the first flight over Manhattan, from Governors Island to Grant’s Tomb and back again. But most stirring for the general public was the illumination of the city, turning New York into Coney Island. (Electric light was still enough of a novelty at the time to be wondrous.) Bridges, public monuments, and many private buildings joined together to create a “City of Light.”

  The Plaza was among them, and its illumination was dazzling, even if some of the lights in the photographs shown here appear to be courtesy of a retoucher. The hotel itself was the center of much activity: It was host to the official representatives of the Netherlands (whose gift to the city was a full-size replica of Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon), and it had its own reviewing stand for parade watchers, constructed on the hotel’s northeast corner.

  Here, the northern facade illuminated in a photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals, the first female photojounalist. Beals’s picture is the only record of The Plaza bearing a sign with its name in electric lights (along the roofline).

  The Pulitzer Fountain

  What to do about the undeveloped asphalt-lined open area in front of The Plaza had been a topic of debate among municipal planners as early as 1898, but it was not until the 1911 death of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer that a formal design took shape. Pulitzer had bequeathed fifty thousand dollars to the city “for the erection of a fountain … preferably at or near the Plaza entrance at 59th Street.…” Proponents of the City Beautiful movement (which espoused grand civic architecture in public spaces for the ennoblement of the populace) suggested a fully redesigned space to accommodate it, loosely based on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. A competition was held and won by Thomas Hastings, of the architectural firm Carrère and Hastings, whose final plan closely adhered to the City Beautiful model: two semicircular islands, anchored on one end by Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman Monument and by the fountain on the other.

  Work began in 1914 with the realignment of the Sherman Monument so that it would fit into the overall symmetric design. Austrian sculptor Karl Bitter was commissioned to fashion an allegorical female figure to top the fountain, and he began work on a statue of Pomona, Roman goddess of abundance, but died just after completing a two-foot model; the final work, executed in bronze and titled Abundance, was finished by two of his assistants, Karl Gruppe and Isidore Konti, and officially dedicated in May 1916.

  Here, an engineer inspects the project’s progress. Here, the completed fountain, surrounded by balustrades and Doric columns, which were later removed during a renovation in the 1930s.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby

  The Plaza has long been an inspiration for writers, and among the first was novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, the golden boy of 1920s literature. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, led much-publicized madcap lives and were ardent Plaza patrons, frequenting the Grill Room, the hotel’s least formal basement restaurant. Not long after the Fitzgeralds’ 1920 marriage, the newlyweds moved into an apartment at 38 West Fifty-ninth Street, just doors down from the Grill. During this period, they made nightly appearances there and one evening Fitzgerald frolicked—cold sober—in the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the hotel. Unfortunately, photographs of this notorious misadventure were never made; the portrait of Scott and Zelda (below, right) was taken somewhere in Alabama in the summer of 1920 and was later used to illustrate a magazine piece called “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.”

  Like most novelists, Fitzgerald incorporated his own experiences into his work, and thus The Plaza appeared frequently as a setting in his novels and short stories. The Beautiful and Damned, his second novel, featured scenes set in the Grill Room, and his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, used the Tearoom and a guest room as backgrounds. (Here, Fitzgerald’s galley proofs for the climactic scene in The Plaza suite in The Great Gatsby; below left, the book’s original dust jacket.)

  Fitzgerald’s passion for The Plaza was famously reflected in a letter written to the author by his friend Ernest Hemingway. “If you really feel blue enough, get yourself heavily insured and I’ll see you can get killed,” Hemingway joked, “and I’ll write you a fine obituary … and we can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, [and] your heart to the Plaza Hotel.”

  New York, 1930

  Not even The Plaza was immune to America’s Great Depression. Business was down, to say the least, but a more significant and enduring chang
e came about as the hotel’s sprawling suites were vacated one by one. The vogue for permanent residence in luxury hotels was over, toppled by changing tastes and reversals of fortune. After the addition of a wing along the Fifty-eighth Street side in 1921—adding rooms, as opposed to suites—The Plaza became a much more transient hotel than it had been in Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt’s day.

  Despite hard times, optimism ran unchecked in the hyperbolic world of advertising, a thriving institution that had come into its own in the 1920s. Here, a 1937 Cadillac ad depicting Grand Army Plaza as seen from the Fifth Avenue door (the hotel crest is visible on the marquee at upper left). The illustration suggests the perfect world that exists only in advertisements: There might be a depression on, but cars were huge, and well-off Plaza patrons always could be counted on to have a nickel for the newsboy.

  Here, a quintessential view of 1930s New York as seen from Central Park, showing the Pierre, Sherry-Netherland, and Savoy-Plaza hotels, the Squibb Building and The Plaza.

  The Persian Room

  This legendary nightclub opened on April 1, 1934—four months after the repeal of Prohibition—and was quickly a favorite haunt of café society. Formerly the southern half of the Fifth Avenue dining room, the space had been reinterpreted in streamlined Art Deco by the Viennese designer Joseph Urban. Urban was both a stage designer and architect, responsible for everything from the sets of the Ziegfeld Follies to the design of the New School in Greenwich Village. The Persian Room proved to be one of his last commissions; he died shortly before its opening.