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

came down, the Berwind Property Group out of Philadelphia, looking to build an upscale hotel chain, had bought up the Barbizon for an estimated $69 million. They renamed it the Melrose Hotel at the Barbizon. Berwind thus also became the new caretakers of the Women; the company’s CEO occasionally brought them home-baked cookies. While the Women had managed to hold on to their rooms, everything else that had constituted the Barbizon Hotel for Women had slowly disappeared: gone were the music rooms, the library, and the outdoor terraces (now attached to $1,200-a-night suites that the rapper and music producer P. Diddy liked to reserve). The Melrose, aiming for a high-end crowd, also featured the Landmark Restaurant and lobby Library Bar. Every day an elderly woman came in, sat down, and ordered a cup of tea with a $375 shot of Louis XIII 220-year-old cognac.

A year later, in 2002, dark-haired Tony Monaco arrived at the Melrose as assistant general manager. The back of the building, where the Women lived behind the secret doors, was still largely untouched. Twenty-one elderly ladies remained, scattered in the back, in the only part of the hotel that was still authentically original, on the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and eleventh floors. The Equinox gym now took over a fourth floor of the hotel, and Tony watched as they yanked out the Barbizon’s original pool, poured concrete over the hotel’s famous second-floor mezzanine from which its young women would look down into the lobby, and then, with electric saws revving, cut out the recital room’s organ pipes that Mrs. Anne Gillen, in pearls and pillbox hat, had played every day during tea hour from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m.

Everything for the Women was about to change once again. The influx of tourists that followed 9/11, in part responding to the patriotic appeal by New York’s mayor Rudy Giuliani to come visit, did not want to dish out hundreds of dollars for their rooms. They were looking for bargain rooms, and the Melrose was not that place. Berwind pivoted. In 2005, the company announced that it was turning the Barbizon into condominiums. New York’s real estate market was booming, and hotels uptown, downtown, east and west were capitalizing on it: the famous Plaza Hotel announced it was doing the same that very year. Once the very last hotel guest reservation had been honored, the only residents left were Tony Monaco and the Women. The Barbizon’s final incarnation as a condominium building was about to begin.

Berwind relocated Tony and the Women temporarily to the nearby Affenia Garden Suites Hotel on Sixty-Third Street between Second and Third Avenues but, more often than not, Tony would spend the night at the Barbizon, amid the gut renovation that he was now overseeing. By then, despite all the renovations, despite the Barbizon going from rethought, to redone, to renovated, it looked outdated, with pitted brass and stained upholstery. It would have been given a “C” by the Barbizon’s former front-desk monitor Mrs. Mae Sibley. Tony Monaco, of a conservationist mindset, salvaged the small metal gold sign that read THE BARBIZON, still hanging on the side of the front door entrance on Sixty-Third Street. It would later become part of his haphazard office decor as manager of the new condominiums.

The gutting that would turn the Barbizon from a hotel to a collection of luxury apartments was all-encompassing. Its insides were pulled out; all the floors were stripped down. The third floor was converted into a shared space for the building’s new tenants, and includes a lounge, a screening room, and a catering kitchen. The challenge of the condominium project was to try to create lush grandeur from the bones of a former women’s hotel with low ceilings, in a section of the city that, while technically on the Upper East Side, was now on a “traffic-choked intersection, on the edge of Midtown.” The building was covered over in scaffolding. The original windows were replaced with French casement windows more than six feet high. Foyers, long galleries, and French doors were integrated into the seventy apartments to give a sense of height, light, and grandeur. Details were carefully chosen, from rosewood parquet, to limestone kitchen flooring, to marble bathroom floors, and sophisticated touchpads to control heat, light, and sound. The name of the condominiums would be Barbizon/63.

Among those who first bought into the Barbizon/63 was Nicola Bulgari, of the Italian jewelry company, who snapped up a $12.75 million duplex penthouse on the seventeenth and eighteenth floors. British actor and comedian Ricky Gervais settled, at first, on a more humble one-bedroom on the ninth floor, buying a second and larger apartment with two balconies on the twelfth floor three years later, in 2011. The former chairman of Meow Mix cat food bought three separate two-bedroom apartments for his children, for a combined total of $12 million. His wife spent less than ten minutes choosing from the available floor plans. The building’s new tenants could not have been more different from the young women for whom the Barbizon had been a soft landing upon their arrival in New York, with only the hotel’s address, which they had read about in the magazines, carefully written out on a piece of paper.

The Barbizon/63 condominium renovation did not leave out the Women. It legally could not do so. Berwind decided to make the fourth floor exclusively theirs. Those who could be persuaded to move to that floor received one-bedroom units and large studio apartments. There were some holdouts, however, such as Regina Reynolds, who had arrived in 1936, and lived on the eleventh floor, the very same floor where Titanic’s Molly Brown stayed. A couple of others also dug in their heels and insisted on staying put in what were legally their single-occupancy rooms (SROs) under rent control. But they too got a redo, if only to eliminate the Women as eyesores for the rich and famous who were about to arrive.

The fourth floor of Barbizon/63 where the Women live looks