From Preservation Online, the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

www.preservationonline.org

A symbol of the Jazz Age and New York City, the Plaza Hotel has perhaps the most famous history of the world's great hotels. Built in 1905-07 to designs of Henry Hardenburgh, architect of Manhattan's Dakota Apartments, the 19-story landmark has appeared in everything from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Kay Thompson's beloved series of "Eloise" children's books, which chronicle the exploits of a precocious Plaza-dwelling eight-year-old. However, if current plans for the Plaza see fruition, the hotel's grand ambiance may be forever consigned to the bookshelf.

The new owners, Elad Properties, a Manhattan-based development company that purchased the hotel for $675 million in August 2004, plan to close the Plaza on April 30. They will reopen in the late autumn of 2006, after renovating and restructuring the 805-room hotel as a condominium residence of 200 "luxury homes" and approximately 150 hotel rooms.

According to Elad, its decision comes on the heels of a decade-long period of relative neglect. "Despite its legendary past," Elad publicist Susi Kasirer said in a Feb. 14 press release, "the truth is that the Plaza Hotel is an aging 98-year old property that has been in steady decline for many years."

The company says it will spend $350 million to refurbish the Plaza and that the hotel's famed interior spaces—the Oak Bar, the Oak Room, the Palm Court, and the hotel's venerable ballroom—will remain structurally unchanged, according to Steve Solomon of Rubenstein Associates, Inc., publicists for Elad.

However, the rooms' functions will be drastically altered: In the current plan, for example, the ballroom and Palm Court may become 160,000 square feet of retail space for what Solomon calls a "very high-end, very upscale" department store.

Elad has hired a duo of architectural firms, Gal Nauer Architects and Costas Kondylis & Partners, to devise a master plan for the conversion. Nauer acknowledges the "tremendous responsibility" that comes with job and says she believes that the renovation plans will "protect and preserve the grandeur of the existing building while taking it into a new era."

Because Elad hasn't settled on a final renovation plan, however, preservationists remain wary of these good intentions. Although the exterior of the Plaza is both a New York City and a National Historic Landmark, none of its interior spaces is protected. This week, however, the New York Landmarks Commission scheduled a public hearing on the Plaza's interior spaces for April 21, 2005.

Groups like the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which this week placed a full-page ad in the New York Times protesting the conversion, say that even the most careful rearrangement of its interior spaces will change the aesthetic and historical character of the hotel.

The present lobby on Central Park South, for example, will become the residential entrance and be screened off from the public interior spaces with a glass wall. The new lobby, which will be oriented towards Fifth Avenue and 58th Street, will be inserted into the former Rose Room, occasioning the removal of a wall. Solomon denies rumors that Elad planned to close down the Oak Room and transform it into further retail space; he says its plans retain the room's function as a restaurant.

The Plaza's public rooms are lavish, coherent examples of Edwardian architecture, and the Oak Room, the hotel's oldest intact interior, is perhaps the most significant of these, remaining virtually unchanged from its opening day in 1907. An example of Jacobean revival splendor, the restaurant boasts 20-foot ceilings enhanced by majestic paneling of sable-dyed English oak and airy frescos of fanciful Rhine castles. The neighboring Oak Bar is decorated with large nocturnal murals by American painter Everett Shinn.

The hotel's ballroom, which opened in 1922 as part of an interior expansion, was the scene of author Truman Capote's famous black-and-white ball of 1966, a masked extravaganza that encapsulated the avant-garde fashion sense of the era. In Eloise Takes a Bath, the ballroom is flooded during a similar event by Thompson's pert heroine, who has neglected to turn off the upstairs taps. The flood was fictitious, of course, but it and the hotel's equally elegant Palm Court may well be damaged by Elad's retail plans.

In an open letter addressed to Robert Tierney, chair of the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, historian and president of the Beaux Arts Alliance David Garrard Lowe expressed "deep concern" for the building's interiors and asked that the commission consider landmarking the interior spaces, which it is still in a position to do.

Tierney agrees that the interior spaces are "significant" but says the Landmarks Commission is "very careful" when suggesting that an interior space be landmarked. "Certainly it's a more intrusive process than an exterior landmarking." So far, Tierney says, Elad "has been very cooperative, and our impressions of their plans are favorable." However, what those plans are has yet to be disclosed. "It's all hypothetical at this point," Tierney says.

While April's public hearing represents a significant step towards possible landmarking, Peg Breen, head of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, points out that it is only a small step. "Regardless of Elad's stated intentions, the only real way to preserve these spaces for once and for all is through landmark designation," she says. "Promises and press releases don't guarantee anything."

Breen says that the conservancy has been deluged with calls and letters from around the world from people concerned with the Plaza's fate. "I can't remember when I've seen such an outpouring of interest. It would be in the developers' best interest to completely preserve it."

The conservancy may find help from an unexpected quarter: the New York Hotel Trades Council, a union that represents the Plaza's current staff of 900 workers. Although the union hasn't opposed other hotel conversions to condominiums, the effects of this trend has proved a tremendous burden to the union's membership, an estimated 1,075 of whom have lost their jobs in the past 18 months.

The Plaza's case is a wake-up call, says Peter Ward, council president. "The Plaza helped crystallize a sense of the economic force we're up against. If they can do this to such an icon, they can do it to any hotel."

Ward has joined Breen and Lowe in pressing the Landmarks Commission to protect the interiors and has enlisted many New York notables in his battle to save the building as a hotel. Among Ward's contacts is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who helped Ward broker a meeting with Elad at which Ward proposed that only the uppermost floors of the hotel be converted into residences. Elad declined to accept the proposal but agreed to meet again with Ward, according to Crain's New York Business. The council is continuing with a "Save the Plaza" campaign, committing at least $1 million to a campaign of television ads and press conferences.

The call does not appear to have gone unheard. Marilyn Fenollosa, regional attorney in the National Trust's Northeast Office, says that although she's appalled by the threat to the building, she's also heartened by the enormous response she's received. "Right now the best thing people can do is to keep reaching out to both Elad and the commission with their thoughts," she says. "Genuine public opinion will help them do the right thing." (The Plaza has been a member of the Trust's Historic Hotels of America program since 1991.)

Whether these efforts prove to be successful has yet to be seen. If the developer considers preservationists' concerns—or if the commission decides to landmark the hotel's interiors—Eloise may enjoy room service for some time to come.

David V. Griffin is a freelance writer living in New York City.

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