The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

Marching down Fifth Avenue, Betty Friedan, Helen Gurley Brown, and Gloria Steinem had linked arms in sisterhood and a demand for gender equality. But for the Barbizon, sex discrimination was in fact central to its mission. It was a strictly women-only hotel residence, from which men were intentionally excluded. The Barbizon thus found itself joining forces with two unlikely partners, the New York Mets and a chain of Bowery hotels, to appeal to the Commission on Human Rights and request an exemption from new mandatory requirements for gender-based equality. The Mets wanted to continue to host ladies’ night eight Saturdays a year; the single-room occupancy dormitory hotels on the Bowery were deemed too dangerous for women; and the Barbizon wanted to continue to be “a home for women.”

That the Barbizon needed to be women-only to continue to function as a sanctuary was a valid claim—and the Barbizon won its appeal. It would be permitted to continue in its mission as a women’s residential hotel. But that victory was soon overshadowed by a different kind of reality: plummeting occupancy rates. The 1969–1970 economic recession had not helped matters, but the real nail in the coffin was the departure of Katie Gibbs in 1972, which translated into the emptying out of two hundred rooms across three full floors. Yet even as the hotel’s occupancy fell to 40 to 50 percent, the front desk staff refused to change their old ways: they were quite willing to turn away Gucci-clad women who had dared to arrive without the required references. That Gucci-clad women were even bothering to show up was itself surprising: the hotel, increasingly run-down, was showing its age.

To add to all of this, New York in the 1970s was a city on the brink of bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford, with Donald Rumsfeld and Alan Greenspan whispering in his ear, had declared there would be no government bailout and that New York City should just drop dead—as the Daily News famously announced on its front page. Even the city’s police force was handing out tourist pamphlets titled “Welcome to Fear City,” illustrated with a hooded skeleton head, and with pointers on how to make it out of the city alive. When Joan Faier encountered the Barbizon at this time, she was confronted by some miserable visuals that mimicked New York city in general: “dimly lit hallways, heavy mahogany furniture, and a gaping hole in the sky-blue paint near the mezzanine’s elaborate crystal chandelier.” She had a one-windowed room, and the now outdated radio speaker fixed above the bed had been painted a horrible “Pepto-Bismol pink.” Another resident declared that the hotel reminded her of Miss Havisham, the spinster recluse in her run-down mansion from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Moreover, the Barbizon could do just so much to shield its residents from the harsh realities of 1970s New York: in 1975, seventy-nine-year-old Ruth Harding, a lonely resident who liked to hang out in the lobby and talk to anyone willing to listen, was strangled to death in her eleventh-floor room. Her murder went unsolved.

The same year that Ruth Harding was murdered in her room, a trendy and controversial hotelier, David Teitelbaum, was brought in to try to save the hotel. The Barbizon’s owners, exasperated with the falling occupancy rates, turned to Teitelbaum, known for choosing jeans and gold chains over pinstripe suits, flexibility over intransigence, Hollywood glam over East Coast conservatism. It was 1975, deep into the disco era. Standing in his snakeskin cowboy boots, Teitelbaum looked around the lobby and took particular note of “the Women,” the Barbizon’s eldest residents, the wrinkled ladies like the late Ruth Harding, who served as a daily warning to the younger guests to move on while they still could. They were Gael Greene’s Lone Women but now a couple of decades down the road. Lori Nathanson, just graduated from Vassar College in 1979, was making conversation with one of them in the elevator when she was asked how long she’d be staying: “Not long,” she replied. “Yes,” said the elderly woman, “that’s what I thought too.” Lori went straight to her room and cried.

The Women had become a serious eyesore, Teitelbaum decided. It was clear to see, if you observed a full twenty-four-hour cycle of the hotel’s life, that they were “lobby sitters in curlers and slippers,” who clustered in groups gossiping and chiding the younger residents. One Barbizon resident recalled the benches by the two elevator banks where the Women positioned themselves strategically to offer unsolicited advice to younger hotel guests heading out for the evening:

“Now where are you going?”

“Now I’m not sure you have on the right clothes.”

“Now are you sure about those shoes?”

With the new manager, Barry Mann, whom he had brought over from the St. Regis, Teitelbaum started to make changes. First, they cleared the furniture out of the lobby, which made the Women none too happy, with one hollering: “Where is my seat?!” Next, they moved out the “dour desk clerks” who had continued to rate guests A, B, and C and demanded to see their reference letters, even as there were no longer enough guests to go around. Out too went the pink and lime furniture, the cabbage-rose wallpaper, and the pictures of weeping clowns; in came chocolate and vanilla hues, Vogue posters, and green plants galore. The restaurant and the famed coffee shop received a sprucing up as well.

Teitelbaum tried to resurrect the Barbizon’s halcyon days, or at least honor them, hoping that would be enough to save the hotel. The few remaining New York City women’s hotels still in operation at this point were the Allerton House, the Evangeline, and the Martha Washington. Yet Teitelbaum believed he could make a newly dusted-off Barbizon (with a half million dollar’s worth of dusting) profitable. He wanted to continue to offer longer-term residencies to the “new girl in town,”