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

all too familiar green paint and the same doors she remembered as leading into the Barbizon’s tiny rooms, each just large enough for a single bed, a sink, a minuscule desk and chair. The old woman glanced back again at Peggy, said nothing, and then closed the door behind her. Peggy shivered as if she had seen a ghost. She had, of course, seen one of the Women.

She returned to Don and her room. All night it was snowing, the wind cold and howling. The heat came on and blasted their room until Peggy and Don were sure it was a hundred degrees in there: just as Joan Didion had suffered from an overenthusiastic air conditioner at the start of her stay at the Barbizon in 1955, so now, in 1985, Peggy suffered from an out-of-control radiator. She and Don unsuccessfully tried to wrench open the window. Hotel personnel came but they were no less able to stop the radiator, nor open the window. The next morning, with breakfast done, they threw their suitcases into a taxi as fast as they could and were gone. It was the last time Peggy stepped foot into the Golden Tulip Barbizon. For all of Teitelbaum’s promise, there remained something dowdy and difficult about the hotel.

But a new wave of hope, mixed with some trepidation, arrived when Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, owners of the famous nightclub Studio 54, the enfants terrible who had been sent to prison for tax evasion at the very height of their nightclub’s popularity, now bought the hotel from KLM’s Tulip. Rubell and Schrager had emerged from prison, following a year’s incarceration, with fresh bold plans to shake up the hotel business. They believed the industry had languished and now hotels offered little more than a bed for the night, maybe with some added luxuries. Their plan was to take hotel living from drab to club, and they began growing a hotel portfolio, in 1988 adding the Barbizon to it. But bad luck, mixed with the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, turned those plans sour. Police were called to a room at the Barbizon in which Craig Spence, a former television correspondent and once powerful Washington lobbyist, was staying with another man. As they arrived, he came rushing out of the room screaming that the other guy had a gun. They found cocaine and a crack pipe inside. Spence, it turned out, was a major client of a gay escort service to which various key members of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations also belonged. Soon after, Georgette Mosbacher, socialite, owner of La Prairie cosmetics, and wife of the secretary of commerce in the Bush administration, was mugged in the hallway just outside her Barbizon room door by a well-dressed, Uzi-toting thief. Mosbacher, known as the most glamorous member of the Bush White House, managed to resist his attempts to force her into the room and instead stripped herself of her own jewelry and handed everything over. These kinds of incidents were difficult to recover from. Guests stayed away. Sure enough, in 1994, Ian Schrager (Steve Rubell had died of hepatitis shortly after the purchase of the Barbizon) was forced to foreclose on the hotel.

But Schrager was not yet ready to let go of the Barbizon, and in 1998, he bought it back (it was exactly what the hotel’s original owners had also done during the Great Depression). With the buy-back came yet another renovation. This time, to lower costs and raise funds, the Barbizon’s pool and former coffee shop were leased out to the Equinox fitness chain, which turned the space into a full three-floor workout experience for any New Yorker able to pay the monthly gym fees. There was also a plastic surgeon on-site two days a week to administer Botox shots, collagen injections, and chemical peels—right down the hall from the yoga room.

Yet through all this, the Women had never budged. They had hung on through David Teitelbaum’s and Ian Schrager’s various tenures and renovations. One could still find the secret door on eight different floors of the hotel, from the fourth to the eleventh: at the very end of the floral-carpeted hallway, there was a door and behind that door, a time machine, with narrow halls, shared bathrooms, and tiny rooms.

By the late 1990s, however, the Women were down to twenty-nine. The staff now called them “the perms.” They haunted the hotel, and even for those who spent their working shifts opening doors, they remained a mystery; the bellhop would nod to them, greet them, knowing they lived in the hotel, and yet it was as if they had appeared out of nowhere. But the Women were more than a ghostly presence; they were living reminders of what this hotel had been and meant before its rooms were gutted, one renovation after another throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

On September 12, 2001, the day after the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the city stood still. In New York, from Fourteenth Street down, you could smell something burning. Lines of people stood outside St. Vincent’s Hospital ready to give blood to those who were wounded. But no one was wounded; everyone was dead. The Twin Towers had collapsed with almost three thousand people in them.

Everywhere there were remainder signs of a normality that had just disappeared; on newsstands you could find New York magazine’s Fall Fashion issue, although now it made your stomach turn to think that anyone cared what the season’s “it coat” would be. It seemed like New York was lost again. What no one could have predicted at that moment was that instead it was the beginning of New York’s ultimate gentrification and corporatization, of the remaking of Times Square into a shopping mall, of tourists in “I ♥ New York” T-shirts, of stunningly low crime rates, of uninhabited mega-apartments for the world’s super-rich that sheltered their taxes but nothing else.

Shortly before the Twin Towers