It Happened on Fifth Avenue

There is a certain type of building on almost every block, in every neighborhood, in every borough of New York City. A boutique goes in and is gone in a blip; next, a restaurant arrives and then shutters within only a few months; now say hello to an espresso bar—and now say goodbye. On and on and on, a merry-go-round of failed enterprises. Paul, the protagonist of my new novel, Cooler Heads, writes his own fictional column about these buildings called “Cursed Corners.” What is it about such locations? Why do they fail to sustain businesses? Is there something about their premises, their unseen workings, that makes them inhospitable to commercial life? Or could the curse simply be a landlord who charges rents so exorbitant that they ensure economic defeat? But then, in bygone days, too—a time, actually not all that long ago, when nearly every commercial lot in the city was occupied—cursed corners were no less prevalent. In every neighborhood, they lived.

Is the curse real? I like to imagine that it is and that its nature is perverse: morbid and creative, patient and impetuous in equal measure. For instance, sometimes the curse holds firm on a vacancy for years and years; other times it allows for a flurry of the most bizarre, commercially impractical operations to appear one after the other, each one more comical/tragic than the next; in other cases, the curse forbids a building’s new tenant from entering the public consciousness such that the structure itself seems to fade from sight.

An example of this last mode is the Plaza Hotel, which originally opened in 1890. Though praised as “one of the most attractive public houses in the wide world” in Moses King’s contemporaneous Handbook of New York City, the hotel failed to turn a profit in a neighborhood that was not yet the commercial hub it would soon become. Fifteen years later, Harry S. Black, considered by many to be the country’s first building developer, knocked down the original Plaza, expanded the footprint by several lots, cranked up the height of the envelope eleven stories, and hired Henry Janeway Hardenbergh to design the structure that still stands today between Fifty-Eighth Street and Central Park South, off Fifth Avenue. Unveiled in 1907, the second coming of the Plaza enjoyed immediate success. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was the inaugural guest, while out front the motorized New York City taxicab debuted. Guests were rich and often famous, and some, like Princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy, checked in for an extended stay with a personal collection of animals, including a lion that was said to live in her bathtub.

With the Jazz Age came the next wave of lore: F. Scott Fitzgerald—a regular guest at the hotel, where tea dances had become all the rave—and his wife, Zelda, caught in a well-publicized, fully clothed splash-about in the Pulitzer Fountain. (It’s in the Plaza, of course, where Gatsby would force Daisy to tell Tom Buchanan that she never loved him; the hotel currently offers a Gatsby Suite.) The Great Depression ushered in a darker period for the hotel, including Black’s suicide and the subsequent deaths of his business partner Bernhard Beinecke and the Plaza’s first manager, Fred Sterry. In 1943, during the austere days of World War II, Conrad Hilton took over the place, only to transfer ownership a decade later to Abraham “Sonny” Sonnabend, who guided the hotel in its arguable heyday, when it continued to play home to writers and artists. (Truman Capote threw his famous Black and White Ball there in 1966.)

Starting in the 1970s, the Plaza began to change hands at a faster clip: Westin; then Donald Trump; then Singaporean developer Kwek Leng Beng and Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal; then El Ad Properties, an Israel-based American real estate developer under which the hotel went semiresidential in 2005. In 2012, the Plaza was partially acquired by Indian conglomerate Sahara India Pariwar, which got itself into legal trouble with minority shareholders by trying to sell the hotel five years later. Finally, in 2018, Katara Hospitality, the Qatari-government-controlled hotel operations and development business, obtained the deed to the Plaza from Sahara for $600 million.

Katara inserted itself into an iconic building without bringing a strong, forward-thinking vision to the table, one that might have acknowledged the global death knell tolling for retail and reimagined the hotel’s many empty interior spaces with an eye toward current trends. (Think of buzzy Café Chelsea on the first floor of the recently renovated Chelsea Hotel.) Instead, the conglomerate is banking on the Plaza’s history and brand—Eloise, tea in the Palm Court, Home Alone 2 (Kevin McCallister’s winter hat is for sale in the hotel gift shop)—to carry the burden of its identity. At The Shops at the Plaza, a below-ground mall virtually unknown to New Yorkers and tourists alike, the curse reappears in the form of the farcical Plazacore Pop-Up, which invites would-be “Plazanistas” to “immerse themselves in the Plaza lifestyle with limited-edition fashion selects.” The curse is laughing. (In fact, for a true believer like Paul of Cooler Heads, it was the curse that, years ago, in an effort to show off its sense of humor, invented the pop-up phenomenon; that is, it gave birth to a business model that could proudly declare its impermanence and thereby conceal a larger truth: that it couldn’t commit to a vision, nor a future, because it had neither the requisite capital nor the faintest idea of what it was and in which direction it would head.) A skirt of double-story scaffolding has been draped around the façade for eleven years and running. And what about the Oak Room, whose name remains on the outside of the building despite the drawn street-side curtains that prevent passersby from seeing inside? Is this an attempt to fool us into thinking that the legendary drinking spot is still in operation? It is most certainly not.

Indeed, the outlook at the Plaza is grim. To walk through the hotel’s public spaces at any time of day is to find a kind of quiet, a human emptiness, and to wonder where everyone has gone. (Even Russian oligarchs—already spectral presences in New York real estate—have begun to depart. In 2023 Valery Kogan listed his condo for $33 million.) At the bottom of the escalators that once led to a basement food court, we see an empty concourse with the lights turned off, the effect of which is eerie and funereal. On a sign listing the businesses and amenities in the hotel (“Guerlain Spa” on the fourth floor, “Grand Ballroom” on the third), the names of the outfits that once operated on this concourse have been scratched off, seemingly with a razor blade. The persistence of this relic, the dankness of this lugubrious hall—they remind us that, contrary to personal and public sentiment, the Plaza is impermanent, replaceable, disposable. Of course, a New York City building may block out the sun, but the best of them will also eclipse any notion of mortality; the fantasy of forever is crucial to their allure; our great edifices know this and perpetuate this idea, never its opposite.

Or rather, they once knew how to do this. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Woolworth Building, the Brill Building—those old lions of the New York realty-scape also appear to be in the grip of the curse. In recent years, all have seen less stable ownership and depressed occupancy; the decline from icon to tradable commodity, tourist trap, and selfie backdrop has been swift. The Chrysler Building “has signed its first tenant following a retail make-over that aims to bring an air of modern luxury into the challenged art deco landmark,” according to a March 1 story in Bisnow, a typical headline these days in the city’s business trades. With Manhattan’s commercial vacancy rate hovering around 22 percent and our avenues checkered with empty storefronts and the identity of our neighborhoods becoming increasingly nebulous and thin, one wonders how and if the curse can be lifted.

For the Plaza, it seems unlikely, with its history of financial instability and its revolving cast of owners—including Trump, who went into bankruptcy on the building after purchasing it in 1988 for the then-astonishing sum of $407 million and taking a reported $83 million loss on its sale in 1995. But perhaps the curse means to stick around, not just at the Plaza but throughout all of New York, so as to provide us with a reflection of our times, where greed reigns and impermanence is a given and preparing a vision for the future doesn’t seem worth the effort—not even that of installing a new sign—because who is to say with any confidence whether or not there will even be a tomorrow?

It’s hard to feel optimistic. But, then, as long as 768 Fifth Avenue continues to beckon new owners to try and try again, who knows. Perhaps just the right circumstances will arise and the time will come when we will once again look out at the Plaza from one of its many significant neighboring points—the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, the General Motors Building, Bergdorf’s, the Paris Theater—and feel a propulsive wave of human energy and attraction, and sensing it we will be drawn back through the hotel’s revolving doors both to revel in its past—the Fitzgeralds in the fountain, Truman Capote’s ball, even Kevin McCallister and his winter hat—while also enjoying the present and all its many offerings.