The Plaza

INTRODUCTION

Subrata Roy was reclining on a sofa in a pink shirt, orange pocket square, and plaid blazer, his outfit contrasting sharply with the sparse, all-white living room. It was a steamy August afternoon in New Delhi in the summer of 2017, but inside it was hushed and cool, a world away from the honking and beggars’ cries ringing out from the crumbling streets below. Roy, his hair and mustache dyed the same black as his shiny shoes, sipped water from a glass handed to him by a uniformed servant carrying a silver tray. After a pause, Roy looked at me and declared, “Such lovely history it has!” I waited for him to expound further, answering my question on why he loved the Plaza, his prized New York hotel. But Roy seemed to have nothing more to add.

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the sixty-nine-year-old fallen mogul had little to say about the historic property. After all, Roy had visited the Plaza just once, and then only for a brief tour. That was back in 2012, just before he shelled out $570 million to buy the hotel.¹ A few weeks later, the Indian Supreme Court issued a devastating decision, ordering Roy to repay more than $3 billion, plus interest, to tens of millions of poverty-stricken Indians who had invested in his company’s bonds. Roy scrambled to refund the money, and was eventually arrested after failing to appear at a court-mandated hearing. He spent two years behind bars in one of Southeast Asia’s most notorious prisons.² In 2016, Roy was released on parole, but while freed from his cell, he remained prohibited from traveling abroad. Roy never had a chance to lay his head on a Plaza pillow, let alone relish his newest toy.

When envisioning the Plaza, most people don’t conjure up visions of an absentee owner stuck in India, plagued by investigations and billions of dollars in debt. They think of Eloise, the impish guest who pours water down the mail chute, or lavish weddings in the gold-and-white ballroom. Maybe for some, the Plaza conjures up images of men in top hats riding horse-drawn carriages, or the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald frolicking in the Pulitzer Fountain. These are all accurate depictions. But today, so is Subrata Roy. How did we get from the glory of what the Plaza once represented to its current state? What does this say about historic institutions and changes in America and the moneyed class? This book is a history of the 1 percent, of celebrity, of pop culture and gossip. It also examines how the Plaza is ground zero for the increasing globalization of money and the slow decoupling of pedigree from wealth.

Hotels straddle the public and private spheres, making them uniquely positioned to explore matters of history, money, and class. This is especially true of the Plaza, with its fame and longevity. Hotels are owned by those seeking profit and prominence and peopled with thousands of employees. And anyone—from a guest who rents out the largest suite, to a tired tourist who stops in for tea, to a prostitute who works the bar—can enjoy them. “To many people the fact that the Plaza is in private ownership is merely a technicality,” the former New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger once wrote. “They look upon it as if they themselves were the owners, as surely as they own Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge.”³

When I started this project three years ago, I, too, harbored a more simplistic vision of the Plaza. It was a hotel that epitomized New York in its heyday, the site of Neil Simon’s comedy Plaza Suite, and where Roger Thornhill was abducted in Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. Or where the spaghetti strap on Marilyn Monroe’s dress broke as she gave a press conference, much to the joy and excitement of the gaggle of photographers who hungrily snapped away.

Growing up, many spring afternoons were spent in Central Park, with the Plaza’s white marble tower looming over Sheep Meadow, a backdrop to my childhood. When my grandmother visited from her small town in Pennsylvania, the Plaza was her hotel. We would often meet for tea at the Palm Court before walking across the street to gawk at the rows of stuffed animals at FAO Schwarz. In 2009, when I was planning my wedding, like many brides before me, I chose to stand among the elegant balustrades, mirrors, and coffered ceiling of the Terrace Room to take my vows.

But as I dug deeper into my research, my view of the hotel shifted. I interviewed retired Plaza bellmen who had spent their careers at the hotel, and frustrated managers who quit after a few short months. I spoke with chefs who oversaw the kitchens, and lawyers who sued management. I traveled from Israel to India to meet with the Plaza’s owners, and if they were no longer alive, I met with their spouses or children. The likes of Eric Trump, President Trump’s middle son, and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, shared with me their memories of the hotel. I spent days buried in the stacks of hotel archives in search of new material. And thanks to recently digitized newspapers and magazines, I sifted through tens of thousands of articles dating from as far back as 1890. I saw the fashions, vanities, and class politics of the rich shift over time, and the impact of union battles, lawsuits, and financial failures. In the end, my idealized version of the Plaza gave way to a deeper, nuanced perspective.

I discovered that the Plaza is a mirror that has reflected the country’s cultural narrative, from era to era, for over a century. The hotel’s first guests were the country’s richest citizens, such as Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and John “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who ushered in a new vogue among the elite for apartment living. The Plaza’s first owner, Harry S. Black, basked in the success of his creation, an expression of his ambition and drive, becoming the first to helm a skyscraper conglomerate. But there was also a darker side to the glamour and wealth. The construction workers erecting the hotel would commit murder before the building was complete. And Harry Black would ride the stock market of the 1920s to its pinnacle, until the 1929 Wall Street crash would find him, pistol in hand, the victim of ruin.

During the Great Depression, it was the steely will of hundreds of wealthy dowager widows that sustained the hotel, their bizarre antics notwithstanding. There was the Kentucky horsewoman who reportedly invented the cocktail party and the princess who arrived with a menagerie that included guinea pigs and a pet lion. She fled without paying her bill, and turned out not to be the only Plaza guest of dubious royal distinction. In fact, one purported baron was unmasked as a huckster who, wooing an heiress, wreaked havoc of Shakespearean proportions.

The Plaza has existed in periods of plenty, in financial depressions, during times of vice and licentiousness, and when the country was pulled apart by politics. The Great War was accompanied by union campaigns and African American strikebreakers, while Prohibition brought bellman bootleggers and F. Scott Fitzgerald. World War II ushered in the rationing of bread rolls and elevator parts, as well as a new Plaza owner, the archetype hotelier Conrad Hilton. With the 1950s came the postwar baby boom, and, suddenly, the deprivations of the previous decade were replaced with a roaring economy and the birth of modern-day consumerism. As usual, the Plaza epitomized the times, housing the author whose six-year-old alter ego, Eloise, also lived at the hotel, spurring one of the largest publishing juggernauts of the era.

The increasing turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s was marked by the Beatles, bomb scares, and the feminist Betty Friedan. As New York’s finances devolved into near bankruptcy, the city itself seemed to be coming apart. At the Plaza, guests faced down gun-wielding robbers, an incursion of prostitutes, and a seven-foot-high oozing pile of garbage next to its front door.

In the 1980s, at the peak of his real estate prowess, Donald Trump bought the Plaza, gilding its rooms in gold leaf and putting his wife Ivana in charge. Then the Trump empire crumbled, and not even a desperate attempt to spy on his enemies could prevent the inevitable. The Plaza filed for bankruptcy—its first and only time—before a Saudi Arabian prince and a billionaire from Singapore took the hotel off Trump’s hands. An increasingly international cast of characters took central stage, with an Israeli developer eventually selling the hotel to India’s Subrata Roy. The summer of 2018 saw the Plaza’s latest handoff, when a hospitality company controlled by the Gulf state of Qatar acquired the building.

Inside, the Plaza’s original 800-odd hotel rooms have shrunk to less than 300, the most coveted views facing Central Park and Fifth Avenue converted into a series of multimillion-dollar condominiums. The hotel’s once-grand lobby has been halved so that Russian oligarchs, South Pacific politicians, and Hollywood executives can have their own private entrance. Everyone from the creator of American Idol, to a disgraced Spanish businessman, to the owner of Jose Cuervo tequila has had a home there. But few, if any, visit. The residents’ lobby is often empty, and upstairs is a series of darkened hallways and mostly unused penthouses. Some apartments serve as anonymous bank accounts, where the world’s wealthiest citizens park, and in some cases launder, their money.

The changes at the Plaza were inevitable. Large-scale New York City luxury hotels don’t make as much sense today. The cost of upkeep for a historic building, the expense of wages for thousands of employees, and the price of operating dozens of public rooms and restaurants is simply too high. Land in Manhattan is far too valuable, and the vagaries of the hotel industry too unstable to justify it. Today, visitors who pass nattily dressed doormen to walk up the carpeted front steps are confronted with the news that the famed Oak Room is shuttered and that aside from the Palm Court, the only place to dine is in a basement-level food hall. There, a warren of subterranean kiosks serve everything from cupcakes to sushi in windowless rows. It’s a far cry from dinner at the Edwardian Room, where tuxedoed waiters once tossed Caesar salad table-side, mixing the creamy dressing with dramatic flourish. In fact, the Edwardian Room is now a vacant storefront.

Throughout its history, the men who owned the Plaza—yes, they were all men, except for Ivana Trump, the closest thing to a woman owner—exploited the hotel’s status for self-aggrandizement and legitimacy. From Harry Black, to Conrad Hilton, to Donald Trump, and, finally, to Subrata Roy, the Plaza has been a means to an end, a pathway to fame. Like the story of The Giving Tree by children’s poet Shel Silverstein, each subsequent owner took what they needed from the hotel, leaving the Plaza further diminished until, at last, what remained was mostly memories. With the new Qatari owners who arrived last summer, it’s possible that finally, this cycle may be reversed, and a flood of investment could return the Plaza to its former stature.

Why has all of this occurred here? What makes the Plaza so uniquely desired? The answer is in part geography. The hotel’s location at the southeastern corner of Central Park, where Fifth Avenue meets Fifty-Ninth Street, is the crossroads of New York’s high streets, where the wealthiest have congregated since the time of the Astor 400. It is also the physical midpoint of Manhattan island, the hub of New York City, which, in many ways, is the center of America and the world. What better way to announce yourself than by purchasing a piece of the Plaza? It is, as one of Subrata Roy’s executives once told me, the ultimate global calling card.

Despite periodic raids from the robber barons of various eras, the Plaza has also benefited from countless good fortunes. There was the owner who rebuffed entreaties to tear down the hotel and replace it with a lucrative office tower. And, in later years, there was the mobilization of employees and preservationists to protect the Plaza’s interiors from demolition. The Plaza’s longevity has also added to its myth. With every decade it survives, it becomes more unusual, more historic, more emblematic of a passing time.

Over its 111 years, the Plaza has extolled beauty on the surface and grit behind the scenes. It has been a story of aspiration and of base instincts, of the moneyed class and those who serve them. It has played host to the country’s most famous Hollywood starlets, Washington politicos, and Wall Street financiers. It has weathered the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, two World Wars, a new millennium, and an influx of billionaire foreigners. It began in an era before radio and exists in the time of Facebook. Like a white marble mountain rising in the center of the city, the Plaza stands weathered, permanent, and implacable. My hope is that this book will memorialize the hotel’s contributions to many of the country’s greatest characters and moments, and answer the question of how we got here.

—Julie Satow, New York City, August 2018