Plaza

Active

Address

Plaza Hotel, 768 Fifth Avenue

GPS

40.764434308746, -73.974103461933

“You follow me to the south side of Central Park, in front of the Plaza.”
Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight. I think he was afraid they would dart down a side-street and out of his life forever.
But they didn’t. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlour of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.
The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as “a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it was a “crazy idea”—we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny…
The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o’clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing her hair.
“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully, and everyone laughed.
“Open another window,” commanded Daisy, without turning around.
“There aren’t any more.”
“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe—”
“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” said Tom impatiently. “You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”
He unrolled the bottle of whisky from the towel and put it on the table.

The Great Gatsby

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Luxury hotel built between 1905 and 1907 to replace an earlier Plaza built between 1883 and 1890. The current eighteen-storey building was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh with a château-like air inspired by the French Renaissance: a marble base, white brick on the upper floors, and a mansard roof. From its opening it became a major social stage in the city: its salons, restaurants, and ballrooms hosted dances, banquets, weddings, and public events, and its proximity to Central Park reinforced its status as a New York icon. In the 1920s, the hotel expanded capacity through a major addition designed by Warren and Wetmore and carried out between 1919 and 1921; at its largest it exceeded 800 rooms. Throughout the 20th century it changed owners several times and underwent numerous renovations. In 2005, a major renovation was undertaken and completed in 2008, reducing the hotel to 282 rooms and converting part of the building into residences.

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