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

last group of Mademoiselle guest editors. After them, the contest was disbanded. It would be another twenty-two years, in 2001, before Mademoiselle ceased publication, by then a shell of its former self, at best.

The 1980s vision for a solvent New York radically changed the face of the city. A New York in which the working class lived side by side with the rich (the New York the CEO of Neiman Marcus tried to show Neva Nelson in 1953 when he had the cabdriver take a circuitous route through Manhattan) would cease to exist. New York would be saved, but in the process, old New York would be lost. The city would find salvation not through federal funding, which President Gerald Ford had made eminently clear, but by catering to private developers and conglomerates promised tax breaks, incentives, and favors. It would be the making of the Trumps and others like them. The 1980s foreshadowed everything that New York would come to represent: money, excess, artifice, and indulgence. It was now Yuppies and Madonna. It was the Odeon, cocaine, Danceteria, and ecstasy.

The Barbizon needed to catch up, because New York would no longer pivot around rent control, the system that had allowed the working and middle classes to live centrally and permanently in Manhattan. When David Teitelbaum was first hired as a consultant for the Barbizon in 1975, he had discovered that well over a hundred of the hotel’s residents were covered under rent-control protection laws: their monthly rents could be raised only by infinitesimal amounts, and their rights as permanent tenants were guaranteed. In 1979 the hotel again changed hands, but Teitelbaum was kept on. The new owners, an Indian hotel chain, wanted exactly what New York was starting to embody. That meant turning the Barbizon into a luxury hotel for women… and men.

The news was not well-received by the Women. A “bejeweled” elderly resident “who identified herself only as ‘a famous theater actress’ ” claimed that “a lot of the nicer women” were against the plan, and she herself was convinced that the addition of men would “encourage a great deal of prostitution.” The Women momentarily put aside their various differences to create a tenants’ association, and hired Leonard Lerner, a successful tenant rights lawyer. Alice Sachs, the persistent Democratic candidate who had lived at the Barbizon since 1935, was in no mood to move. She and the others were paying an average of $275 a month for their rooms, which included daily maid service, a front desk that took messages, and a fantastic location. In contrast, rents for small-size apartments on the Upper East Side were starting to creep up in the range of a thousand dollars a month. Men or no men, she was staying put. Alice Delman, another longtime resident, was none too happy at the thought of seeing men “in the halls at all hours of the night in various stages of dress.” But with the hotel continuing to lose money, Barry Mann, the Barbizon’s manager hired by Teitelbaum, had the most convincing argument for the change: “there’s only one sex left.”

At first, Teitelbaum offered $1 million to clear the place of the Women. Their attorney flat-out rejected it and countered with $10 million or, he suggested (with more than a little sarcasm), there was always the option of building an apartment building for 114 women on a vacant Manhattan lot. Under New York rental laws, their Barbizon rooms were untouchable, categorized as SROs, single-room occupancy units in multi-tenant buildings with shared bathrooms. Unable to convince the Women to move, Teitelbaum and the new owners had no option but to let them stay; so they decided to carve out a special wing of reconditioned rooms for them instead. With that hurdle out of the way, Teitelbaum had effectively cleared the way for men to enter the hallowed halls of the Barbizon while maintaining the older female residents’ rights.

The Barbizon Hotel in 1980, having seen better days, shortly before it would go unisex.

The closing bell for the Barbizon Hotel’s fifty-four years of single-sex living was strategically set to ring on Valentine’s Day 1981. The titillation of being the first man ever to spend the night at the Barbizon (if you didn’t count Malachy McCourt and a handful of others who’d claimed to have made it up the stairs) brought such an influx of phone calls that the hotel decided on a well-publicized raffle drawing on February 12 to determine who would be the first man—as well as the first couple—to officially make it past the lobby. The male raffle winner turned out to be a thirty-nine-year-old homeopathic doctor from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who looked a lot like Captain Stubing on The Love Boat. Dr. David Cleveland got the call two days before Valentine’s that he had won, and that a limousine would be meeting him at JFK airport in New York to whisk him to the grand opening. For weeks, the doctor had been trying to ask out a waitress at the Parrot Café in Cambridge, around the corner from Harvard University. He had even bought two tickets to the island of Curaçao for a weekend getaway, which she had refused. The Barbizon win—with limousine service, free meals, and Broadway shows included—also did not shift her position. Thus Dr. Cleveland, balding, with tufts of white curly hair on either side of his head, bought a wide-lapeled tuxedo with a ruffled shirt and an oversize bow tie, and headed off to New York alone.

On Saturday, February 14, at 11:30 a.m., a one-hundred-by-forty-five-foot, ten-story-size Valentine banner fluttered on the outside of the Barbizon Hotel. Sammy Cahn, the lyricist for a string of romantic hits, crooned into the microphone set up in the lobby, singing some of his best-known songs, including “Love and Marriage,” “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” and “All the Way.” He even incorporated the doctor’s name into a special song for the occasion. Photographers were on hand as Dr. Cleveland was kissed on the cheek