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

by Wendi Teitelbaum (David Teitelbaum’s daughter), dressed in a tight-fitting bellhop outfit. Waiters and waitresses in white hardhats (to match the decor of the scaffolding-covered hotel) walked around with trays of champagne and served slices from an enormous, perfect cake replica of the Barbizon. Dr. Cleveland, perhaps revealing why he could not get the Parrot Café waitress to go on a date with him, pulled out a can of “aphrodisiac” smoked oysters he had brought along as a lark and posed for the flashing cameras.

William Nicholas of Long Island, a wholesale fabric showroom manager, and his wife, Catherine, won as the first couple, and together with Dr. Cleveland, they were introduced to the crowd that had gathered, and then ceremoniously handed their room keys to much applause. Dr. Cleveland (and Mr. Nicholas) were thus the first men to walk the forbidden bedroom floors; or certainly the first to do so officially, without attempting to bribe the hotel employees, or scale the fire escape, or dress up in a surgical suit. Seventy other men had also booked rooms at the Barbizon for that first memorable weekend.

The splashy event had made an impression, and longtime resident, Democratic candidate, and key member of the Women, Alice Sachs, was feeling optimistic, telling a television crew, “I’m excited. I’m interested. I hope everything works out well.” Another of the Women went further and admitted, “I’ve come to the conclusion only today because I really didn’t know and it was a concept, an idea whose time has come.” David Teitelbaum, unable to purge the Women, was now advertising them as part of the mythological history of the hotel.

Nine months later, however, Teitelbaum temporarily closed the hotel for a full multimillion-dollar facelift. He continued to insist that while now unisex, his vision for the refurbished hotel remained a women-centered space, even if men were permitted in. “Just because you put a skirt hanger in a room doesn’t mean you’re catering to women,” he said. While the hotel manager was male, the marketing director, interior designer, design coordinator, and chef he had hired were all young and female. There would be a full spa experience available, and pink marble walls in the lobby and the lobby bar. Rooms would have makeup lights, French hand soap from Le Gallet, bath foam, and hand lotion.

Teitelbaum, a college dropout who had grown up on a date farm in California, was an outlier among the other New York developers. He did not believe in rebuilding but rather in redoing a place, in restoring old buildings—not to their original glory but by rethinking their insides. He had publicly criticized fellow developer Donald Trump for destroying the art deco Bonwit Teller friezes of dancing women that he had provisionally promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Trump’s promise gave way to the ease of a jackhammer; it was, after all, so much more simple to destroy them than to take the time and expense to remove them intact. In contrast, Teitelbaum wanted to preserve old New York while making it profitable again. He envisioned the new Barbizon as a European spa hotel, offering a visual nod to its French Barbizon arts roots. But his vision was expensive and soon ran over budget to the tune of millions. He had to seek a deal with the Royal Dutch Airlines KLM’s Tulip Hotel Management Division. While the deal meant that the Barbizon would now be renamed the Golden Tulip Barbizon Hotel, it also meant Teitelbaum’s renovation could be done, with a final budget of $60 million.

In 1984, the hotel’s reincarnation finally complete, KLM Tulip celebrated with a Dutch festival that included herrings, tulips, Dutch gin, and New York mayor Ed Koch. The hotel conversion had included a serious restructuring: the former Barbizon Hotel for Women with almost seven hundred tiny rooms was now the Golden Tulip Barbizon with 368 spacious rooms with private bathrooms. Artist Richard Haas was commissioned to paint a leafy and somewhat tacky trompe l’oeil on the recessed ceiling above the lobby and the mezzanine. Interior walls were painted pink with ochre sandstone details; the intention was to play off the rosy colors of the Moorish brick on the outside of the Barbizon, and also to echo the early morning light over the forest of Fontainebleau that had inspired the Barbizon artists. A restaurant was now on the mezzanine where before nervous young ladies had peered over to check out their dates.

In 1985, Peggy LaViolette, Joan Didion’s best friend and fellow Mademoiselle guest editor from the summer of 1955, came to stay at the Golden Tulip Barbizon with her husband, Don. They were heading east for Christmas: a daughter was working at Elle magazine and a son at the New Yorker. Peggy had read in the New York Times that the Barbizon had been recently converted to a regular hotel from the women-only residential hotel where she and Joan had stayed next door to each other. Feeling nostalgic, Peggy booked a room. When she walked in, she was struck by how dramatically the hotel had changed. Gutted of its original interior, it now showcased 1980s decor—heavy drapes, soft couches, everywhere deep cream paint with touches of gold trim. The menu at the Café Barbizon, up on the mezzanine, was the typical 1980s “international cuisine” fare, such as avocado stuffed with Norwegian shrimp, chicken salad with curry and celery, potato salad with bacon bits and scallions, Barbizon rice pudding, and brownie à la mode. Their hotel room was constructed out of a cluster of the type of tiny rooms in which she and Joan had stayed exactly thirty years earlier.

As Peggy made her way down the hall of their floor that same evening, an elderly woman suddenly brushed past her in a rush to get to the end of the hall, where she paused and then pulled open an unmarked door. She turned and looked Peggy over before stepping inside. In that moment, as the old lady held the door open, Peggy glimpsed the