And Satow seems aware it's more fun to discuss flamboyant elites a century old than to contemplate modern inequalities of wealth she recounts the many mishaps of condo development with a sort of grim glee in the chapter titled "Shell Game." Issues of race are often sidelined amid anecdotes of the rich and famous, but occasionally class tension takes the spotlight it's particularly striking to read about the Hotel Trades Council's fight for severance for 550 staff laid off in the wake of a takeover, given the ease with which hundreds of millions was flowing over employees' heads. (It's especially egregious given the demanding clientele customer service folks may shudder with familiarity when reading Kay Thompson use her little-girl Eloise voice to demand "hot hot hot" coffee from room service in front of press.) But at some point, it's impossible to ignore the distance between backroom billionaires and the employees whose jobs were regularly considered expendable. Such larger-than-life figures abound, both in guest rooms and owners' offices. Even New York has limits.) The details are dramatic - whether charming or staggering - and though the game of investor hot-potato gets complicated, there are plenty of colorful asides that ground the story in particulars, from the specifics of sugar rationing to Kay Thompson inventing the irrepressible Eloise. (Except the Green Tulip, a Technicolor experiment that lasted less than three years. ![]() Through personal interviews, first-person accounts, and established histories, Satow provides an energetic timeline that embraces the chaos of history: union members commit murder and also save the hotel from total conversion to condos four decades of outside investors each snap up and then swiftly ditch the hotel renovations are invariably greeted with horror before leaving their own nostalgic mark. In fact, Julie Satow argues in The Plaza that no other New York edifice has so directly reflected the city itself - the hotel's shift from old money to new business, the often-strained relationship between developers and unions, increasing globalization of commerce, and every generation's convenient interpretations of the past all mirrored the Big Apple. And over the last century or so it has survived economic highs and lows, a transforming skyline, and the social sea change that made money, not pedigree, the hotel's most important calling card. (An earlier, apparently less impressive Plaza was torn down in 1905 in favor of this taller, grander, French chateau-er version.) A pinnacle of refined excess, it pioneered amenities that became New York standards - like taxicabs. Relentless capitalism is nothing new to the Plaza, which provided Old World opulence to elite clientele when it opened in 1907 the first guest was a Vanderbilt. The bedroom farce unfolds in replicas of the hotel's luxurious suites and plush lobby, amid two equally high-stakes outrages: the corporate espionage and the $12.50 pancakes. ![]() ![]() In 1988's Big Business, Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin (twice each) play mismatched twins who converge on the Plaza Hotel for a fateful stockholders' meeting.
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