Engraved vignettes of the original separate hotels.
The new Starlight Pool reveals the sky via a retractable roof and will include a winter garden and theatre for residents.
Nova York - Estados Unidos
Fotografia
Texto 1:
Ask an average New Yorker to name the city’s most famous hotel and they would likely point either to The Plaza on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street or to the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue and 50th Street. Fewer, however, may know that since 1897, the original Waldorf-Astoria (or 1893 of counting the original Waldorf) on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets reigned supreme among the city’s high society and well-heeled visitors alike. The once-hyphenated hotel has jockeyed with the Plaza for the title of the city’s most famous hotel ever since, even after its successor opened on Park Avenue in 1931, with an Art Deco sumptuousness that outshone the hulking extravaganza for its predecessor.
The Towers at Waldorf Astoria is a crown jewel of New York’s ongoing golden era of condominium conversions stands at the corner of Park Avenue and East 50th Street, where the upper floors of the legendary Waldorf-Astoria Hotel are being renovated into 375 opulent apartments.
The ongoing refurbishment is a major interior make-over that will not alter its green Mayan-style roof-top turrets nor do away from its famous lobby clock tower that was commissioned by Queen Victoria for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. As the development approaches its target sales date, now is a perfect time to delve into the storied history of the storied hotel and its once equally-famed predecessor, the original Waldorf-Astoria now replaced by the Empire State Building.
*The original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel:
The original, opulent Waldorf-Astoria on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street has long since been replaced by the even more famous Empire State Building. Thankfully, a plethora of historic accounts has preserved the memory of the grand chateau in exquisite detail.
The hotel’s hyphen reflects a long and often contentious history intertwined with the Astors, one of New York’s most powerful turn-of-the-century families. The Waldorf occupied the site of John Jacob Astor's town house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street and was erected by his son the Honorable William Waldorf Astor for George C. Boldt. The hotel, which opened for business March 14, 1893, takes its name from the little town of Waldorf in the Duchy Baden, Germany, the ancestral home of the Astor family. A picture of the town in stained glass could be found over the main entrance of the South Palm Garden on the 33rd Street side of the building.
The Astoria, which occupied the site of William B. Astor's townhouse on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, was erected by his son Col. John Jacob Astor for Mr. Boldt, and opened for business November 1, 1897. It is named for the town of Astoria, founded in the year 1811 by John Jacob Astor the first, at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon.
Both hotels were designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, already notable for the Dakota apartment building and soon to be famed for the Plaza Hotel, in an exuberant German Renaissance style, with the first hotel treated as an end pavilion and the combined development containing 1,300 bedrooms and 40 public rooms.
In their great book, "New York 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism, 1890-1915," Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and John Massengale provide the following commentary on the family feud and its unique architectural manifestation:
"The Waldorf was built by William Waldorf Astor, who was preparing to settle in England where he could buy himself a title (he ultimately became a viscount). Astor razed his father's house on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street and overshadowed his despised aunt's house next door on the avenue with a massive ten-story hotel crowned by turrets and enormous gables rising another three or four stories. Aunt Caroline's son, John Jacob, decided it would be fun to demolish his mother's house and build stables to stink up William's resplendent hotel. But since they were in business together - their joint fortune estimated at two hundred million dollars - John Jacob reconsidered and joined his cousin William Waldorf in the hotel business. John wanted to name his part of the hotel Schermerhorn for his mother's family, but William persuaded him to call the new, taller section the Astoria, after the dream city John Jacob I had hoped to develop in his fur-trapping empire.”
On Tom Miller’ great blog, Daytonian in Manhattan, the article "The Lost Waldorf-Astoria Hotel - Fifth Avenue at 33rd Street" offers further insight:
"The heated family feud between William Astor and his aunt, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, came to a head in 1890. Living next door to her was no longer possible for William. The near-twin brownstone mansions his father, John Jacob Astor II, and his uncle, William Backhouse Astor, had built were separated by a wide common garden.... Caroline Astor reigned supreme over New York Society in the 1890s. Her mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street was the scene of annual balls for three hundred or more of society's most elite....
"The 13-story hotel dwarfed Caroline Astor's venerable home and was recognized as the last word in opulence. Hardenbergh's creation has 530 rooms and 350 private bathrooms. The sumptuous public spaces were immense and of the more than $3 million total cost, $800,000 was spent on interior fixtures and furnishings.… Astor hired George C. Boldt, manager of the Bellevue and Stratford Hotels in Philadelphia, to run the Waldforf....
"Astor pulled up all the stops in decorating the interiors to guarantee that his was New York's most elegant hotel. The main entrance hall rose 21 feet and boasted Sienna marble pilasters with solid bronze capitals. Off the entrance hall was the garden court with full-grown palms and flowering plants. The German-inspired black oak-paneled cafe on this level, for men only, featured unusual lighting fixtures. 'The lights in this room will spring from stag-horn torches held by carved figures of the Tyrolerweibschen, or Tyrolean women,' said The Times....
"The main dining room was a reproduction of a great hall in the palace of King Ludwig of Bavaria....The Ladies' Drawing Room, off the dining hall, was a 'perfect reproduction of an apartment of Marie Antoinette,' said The Times....
"The collaboration of two feuding cousins was a phenomenal success. The Waldorf-Astoria became synonymous with wealth and luxury in hotels. The long marble corridor that connected the two buildings earned the nickname 'Peacock Alley.…' The Waldorf-Astoria overtook Delmonico's and Sherry's as the place to entertain. And Boldt kept up with the times. He initiated Monday-morning musicales, a trend that caught on with society and he installed ping-pong tables for women when indoor tennis became the rage. He brought in telephones, dumb waiters for room service, pneumatic tubes for rapid mail delivery, and instituted the 'floor clerk.'"
The final product was a palace of luxury hardly matched on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. The Thirty-third Street entrance had an ornate entrance marquee with four finials and a central lantern in front of a five-step-up entrance. The 34th Street entrance was even more imposing as it was not only much longer but also deeper and was nestled beneath a long arcade of recessed arches and the ends of the building sported tall, Moorish-like turrets and many finials. A few balconies modulated the building's bulk.
The center of the main lobby was highlighted by a large clock that had been commissioned by Queen Victoria for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Its four faces showed the time in New York, Madrid, Tokyo and Constantinople and the ornate piece was topped with a miniature of the Statue of Liberty.
*The second Waldorf-Astoria Hotel:
The volatile and ephemeral tastes of the high society change as rapidly as the elites change their wardrobes. The hotel that was the last word in societal fashion in 1897 was already considered staid and passe by the first decades of the 20th century, especially when the crisper, airier, green-and-white visage of the Plaza Hotel made the stalward Waldorf-Astoria look like a cumbersome, Old World pile of heavy ornament and dour futnishings that would not compete with the Plaza’s top-of-the-line tech marvels such as in-unit thermostats.
By the 1920’s, just as a stock market craze gripped the nation, New York caught the skyscraper fever, with developers literally racing against time and against one another to build the tallest, the largest, and the most splendid towers. On May 3, 1929, the Waldorf-Astoria closed its doors and was demolished shortly afterward to make way for the Empire State Building, which would reign as the world’s tallest freestanding structure from 1931 to 1967, when it was surpassed by the Ostankino Tower in Moscow; in 1970, the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Downtown surpassed the Empire State Building as the world’s tallest building, as well.
In their sequel to the book quoted earlier in the article, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellings gave the following description of the second Waldorf-Astoria:
“The era of skyscraper hotels reached its peak in 1931 with the second Waldorf Astoria, which was designed by Schulze & Weaver, who had co-designed the great Sherry-Netherland Hotel on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street in 1927 with Buchman & Kahn.
"With its enormous slab rising from a crenellated base," the authors wrote, "the Waldorf-Astoria, occupying the entire block (80 percent of which was above railroad tracks) between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth streets, Park and Lexington avenues, made a quantum jump in scale and complexity beyond that of the typical skyscraper - whether devoted to offices or hotels - of the interwar era....
"Rejecting virtually all references to the original Waldorf - only the hotel's name and that of the famed Empire Room and Peacock Alley were retained - the new building was an exceptionally elegant exemplar of Modern Classicism, yet it included many suites that used period styles as well as large architectural fragments, such as paneled walls and mantelpieces from historic buildings in England and France.
The design was largely the work of Lloyd Morgan and Louis Rigal, according to the author's. There was drive-though the mid section of the building a siding for those arrived on their private railroad cars.
Just as the original hotel, the new Waldorf was an instant sensation. Its Starlight Roof on Park Avenue had a retractable, open-air roof and the hotel's splendiferous ballroom ensemble could accommodate several thousand people and was the favored locale of the famous Al Smith political dinner, the very social April in Paris Ball and countless events such as the Explorers' Club annual dinner where balut, an African dish of a chicken egg cooked for a few seconds and eaten beaks and claws, and raw lamb's eyes with tough muscle and acid-like liquid were consumed.
The elegance of the hotel's Art Deco decorations such as the stainless steel maidens adorning the elevator cabs in the lobby was unmatched.
When the hotel opened on Park Avenue in 1931, it was the tallest in the world and had a radio in every one of its 2,200 suites, in-room dining and 'manufactured weather ' (the term used then for air-conditioning. "It was the most luxurious of its time," notes Katherine Clarke in her 2019 article in The Wall Street Journal. "Almost immediately following its launch, the hotel had to endure the Great Depression. At one point in 1932, it had 1,600 people on its payroll but just 260 registered guests," the article continued.
Many of the property's hotel rooms were modestly sized, yet some suites in "The Towers," the building’s upper portion, were quite spacious, such as the six-bedroom suite occupied by composer Cole Porter. Clarke reported that "his library, designed by Billy Baldwin in 1955, featured tortoise-shell leather walls and brass tube bookshelves." According to "The Waldorf Astoria: America's Gilden Dream," a book by Ware Morehouse III, Frank Sinatra subsequently paid $1 million a year to keep that same suite.
*The convertion and renovation:
Conrad Hilton, who at one point also operated the Plaza, eventually acquired the Waldorf-Astoria. His company, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, sold the hotel in 2015 for $1.95 billion to Chinese holding company Anbang which closed it two years later to convert it to 375 condominium apartments and 350 hotel rooms. Hilton will continue to operate the hotel and the condominiums.
The revamp is being carried out by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Anbang is working to carefully restore some of the hotel’s interiors—including the West Lounge, formerly known as Peacock Alley, which is located on the first floor; the Grand Ballroom and balconies on the third floor; and the Park Avenue lobby, with its 13 murals and a floor mosaic designed by French artist Louis Rigal—that were designated landmarks in 2017. Louis Deniot, a Paris-based designer, is designing the apartments and residential common areas, and Pierre-Yves Rochon is designing the hotel's public spaces.
The refurbished hotel will contain 376 hotel rooms on the lower floors and the condo units will be on floors 12 through 43, with floors 40, 41 and 42 having only two units each. The project's offering plan indicates an average unit size of 1,747 square feet, with apartments ranging from modest studios or guest suite, to a 6,647-square-foot four-bedroom condo that comes with a library and a 3,589-square foot terrace, a 19-foot-long entry foyer that leads past an enclosed, 19-foot-wide kitchen to a 32-foot-wide living/dining room and three bedrooms.
Three more sprawling units — each more than 6,100 square feet, plus terraces — will comprise the penthouses. One of these will have a 46-foot-wide living room, a 16-foot-wide library, a 21-foot-wide entertainment room, a 25-foot-wide dining room and a 29-foot-long kitchen with an island and three bedrooms.
According to the offering plan, condo owners can also license 150 storage bins, 41 wine lockers and 34 parking spots. Storage bins cost $180 to $1,440 for the year; wine lockers run $1,500 a year and parking spots are $6,000 a year.
Park Avenue and the Grand Central Terminal area are undergoing significant change after the city rezoning Vanderbilt Avenue to permit larger buildings, several of which only now being redeveloped.
Despite considerable hoopla about the Hudson Yards projects on the far west of Midtown, Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral remain the heart and soul of Manhattan and they are also on 50th Street, Waldorf's street.
Texto 2:
The Waldorf Astoria was once the tallest, largest and grandest place to live in the world, but it is a building with a double identity and a strange history.
It has two copper crowns; an Art Deco castle with twin towers. It is a dense mass of urbanity positioned above thin air, situated not on the bedrock of Manhattan but above the tracks of the railway line that runs beneath.
It is a hotel, but it has always offered apartments for rent, in which some of New York’s most famous figures lived out their lives.
It is a skyscraper but it is too fat to be a tower. With 1,400 rooms, it is too big to be truly luxurious, and too familiar to be exclusive. It is open to everyone but not, of course, to everyone.
“All the luxuries of private home . . . ” wrote the poet Langston Hughes on its opening in 1931. “Now, won’t that be charming when the last flop-house has turned you down this winter?”
This year, the 47-storey Park Avenue building is about to undergo another radical split, between hotel and real estate. As Hughes wrote: “Wouldn’t a duplex high above the street be grand, with a view of the richest city in the world at your nose?”
When its $1bn refurbishment is complete, there will be fewer but more spacious rooms: 375 residences, mostly in the towers and with their own entrance, and a further 375 hotel rooms. The Towers of the Waldorf Astoria will encompass apartments ranging from studios (starting from $1.7m) to four-bedroom properties, penthouses to “marquee residences” with expansive terraces.
The branded residences are the first to have been available to buy in the hotel. It is an ambitious project: $2.6bn worth of apartments will be entering a post-pandemic New York property market that was already under pressure.
Converting parts of the Waldorf Astoria into condos was a gamble before Covid-19, as Manhattan is awash with unsold luxury apartments. According to one real estate consultant, there are more than 8,500 unsold newly built units in Manhattan. Now it will be even more of a challenge.
But, as befits the first hotel to offer room service, all residents will have access to the services of the hotel (“at an ultra-luxury level”), mediated through “concierge closets”, spaces between the staff corridors and apartments accessible to both staff and residents for the exchange of dry cleaning, parcels and empty champagne bottles. Now, they are being marketed as the perfect tools for social distancing and self-isolation.
In 2014 the Waldorf Astoria was sold for almost $2bn to Anbang, the globally ambitious but troubled Chinese insurance company, making it the most expensive hotel ever. In 2017, Anbang founder Wu Xiaohui was detained by the Chinese government as part of Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption. He was convicted of fraud and embezzlement and is now in a Chinese jail.
The insurer was rebranded as Dajia. It is not surprising that Donald Trump was the first US president not to stay here (traditionally, the hotel has hosted visiting US presidents from Hoover to Obama).
If the hotel’s ownership appears troubled, its genesis, too, is a fantastic story of family feuds, inherited wealth, branding, architecture, real estate and financial and cultural leverage.
Its history begins with a mansion on 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue. John Jacob Astor III’s house became a nexus for New York society and on his death in 1890, the site was passed to his son William Waldorf Astor (who later in England became a peer and bought Cliveden and Hever Castle) and William’s cousin John Jacob (“Jack”) Astor IV, who would die on the Titanic in 1912.
William began work on building the 13-storey Waldorf Hotel on his part of the site. Jack followed by building the 16-storey Astoria hard up against it on his part. The cousins’ relationship was fraught, but they managed to co-operate in business. William persuaded Jack to sell his half of the site.
The twin hotels became a ballroom for the city. In his brilliant analysis of the nature of New York architecture, Delirious New York (1978), the architect Rem Koolhaas wrote: “Waldorf pulls society from its hiding places to what becomes in effect a colossal collective salon for exhibiting and introducing new urban manners (such as women alone — yet clearly respectable — smoking in public).”
The schism between the hotels was embodied in Peacock Alley, a glass-roofed arcade of shops that ran between them (or so legend has it) and became Manhattan’s poshest parade, a place where women could safely stroll and not get their skirts muddy.
By the late 1920s, Manhattan’s social centre had moved north. The old hotels looked underscaled and dated and a new site was acquired further up Park Avenue to catch wealthy passengers arriving at Grand Central Station. The old hotels were sold to developers in 1929 and became the site of the Empire State Building, just in time to miss the Wall Street crash.
The new hotel was to be a monster, as big as the Empire State but squashed into a larger, fatter building, an entire block between 49th and 50th Streets. Designed by architects Schultze & Weaver, it opened in 1931 — a Manhattan mountain, its walls cliffs of granite and limestone, its interior a metropolis in miniature.
A contemporary section through the building reveals its density and complexity, from the kitchens and bakery in the basement between the train lines to the elevated lobby, the array of club rooms, ballrooms, restaurants, bars, radio studios, shops and suites; the Manhattan dream of the vertical city.
“It’s a magnificent building,” architect Robert AM Stern tells me, “one of the best of the 1930s and often under-appreciated. The massing makes it appear like two buildings, everything is perfectly scaled to everything else and the details are beautiful. It represents a great moment in New York culture and architecture.”
Everything seems to have happened there, from the launch of the LP record in 1948 to IBM’s personal computer in 1981. Long-term residents who rented suites for astonishing sums included Cole Porter (whose piano is still in the hotel), mobster Bugsy Siegel, Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra (he rented Porter’s old suite in 1964 for $1m a year).
It became the New York base of every US president until the current hotelier incumbent. But as that Langston Hughes poem, Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria, published shortly after the 1931 opening, suggests, it was not for everyone.
“Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not? Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of your labour,
Who clip coupons with clean white fingers because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed garments, poured steel
To let other people draw dividends and live easy.”
Lawrence Jackson, professor of English and history at Johns Hopkins, says: “Hughes introduces the complete panorama of black labour in the creation of opulence. Digging the foundations, the grunt work. The hotel was a part of the exploitation of black labour.”
Like all such institutions at that time, the hotel was segregated, which has been deftly excised from its histories. Black people could work and perform there, but they could not stay as guests. Even in 1943 the hotel had to break its own policies to accommodate the president of Liberia.
There are other subterranean histories. One is the semi-mythical Track 61, a leftover from the site’s history as a power plant for Grand Central. Right underneath the current hotel is a railway track with a platform, once used to transport coal and which was upgraded and occasionally used for access to the building, including surreptitiously by President Roosevelt in an effort to conceal his disability. His entire armour-plated car would be loaded on to the train and taken up via a private elevator.
The rail spur has made countless pop culture appearances, from a party thrown by Andy Warhol in 1965 to an escape route in the 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 123. The platform can just be glimpsed from the windows of the Metro North trains leaving the station.
The hotel is a film star in its own right, appearing first in Week-end at the Waldorf (1945), and later in Coming to America, Scent of a Woman, Serendipity and dozens more.
Interior designer Pierre-Yves Rochon will be reinterpreting the Deco interiors (he redesigned London’s smaller but similarly lavish Art Deco Savoy Hotel), while architects SOM have the job of rejigging one of Manhattan’s most complex buildings.
The Starlight Pool, with the sky visible via a retractable roof, will comprise a winter garden, private dining room, library, workspaces and residents’ own dedicated theatre.
One Waldorf regular over the years was Phyllis Lambert, architect, client for the nearby Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe and founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
“I loved the discretion and small lobby of the Waldorf Towers and its location near the Seagram Building so I rented a small suite every time I came to New York over 40 years,” she told me.
“These suites were not my style but of first-class quality which is impossible to find now in NY. I knew the St Regis and the Plaza well but none compared to the intimacy, comfort and discretion. The staff hardly ever changed.”
She adds a note of caution about its development. “I fear that it [might] get ruined and glitzed as did the Ritz in Paris and London a few decades ago.”
When I was shown around, a couple of months before lockdown began, there was not much to see except a screening room, a slick video concentrating on the history and the restored “Spirit of Achievement”, the slender Deco figure that adorned the hotel’s canopy, sculpted by Icelandic artist Nina Sæmundsson in 1931.
It felt a little underwhelming, a little too carefully under wraps. Is this the right time to be launching a super-lux property in Midtown Manhattan? Certainly the central section of the city is seeing a return of residential, as is Downtown, while the Upper East Side languishes a bit. And the brand is unassailable. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote: “You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight” in Arrival at the Waldorf.
It sounds romantic but, of course, you cannot touch moonlight. In fact, you can barely see anything. Boarded up and forlorn, the building is a dull cliff of stained grey limestone. But the idea of the Waldorf Astoria is indelible. It is a myth as much as it is a building and institution. And a myth makes priceless marketing.
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