The Plaza Hotel was an instant New York City icon, though today it's dwarfed by a neighboring office building. When completed in 1907, it towered above the surrounding mansions and represented the height of hotel luxury. Mixing European glamour with the most modern amenities, it replaced the Waldorf-Astoria 25 blocks to the south as the place the elite stayed and entertained.
For the hotel's opening, the Plaza's manager Frank Sterry, arranged the grand entrance of ladies' man, Alfred Gwynn Vanderbilt as the first guest, and a celebration featuring other local royalty, including financier George Jay Gould; department store innovator, John Wanamaker, and Benjamin Duke, Vice President of the American Tobacco Company.
In addition to a crowd of spectators, the city's first motorized taxi fleet lined up outside the Plaza. Drivers dressed like West Point cadets sat inside cars painted red with green stripes. Taximeters tracked fares, which cost 30 cents for the first half mile and 10 cents for each additional quarter mile. This building was the second Plaza Hotel. Seventeen years earlier, on October 1, 1890, a different hotel by the same name on the same site had opened at the cost of $3 million. But new owners had plans for something grander, which required building a new from the ground up.
Starting with its design, the hotel blended old world and new. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, the same architect responsible for the Waldorf-Astoria, created a structure "that effortlessly merged a French chateau with a skyscraper" with 800 guest rooms, 17 apartments, and 500 bathrooms.
Inside, guests were surrounded by custom European and local luxury items such as Irish linens, French crystal, and Swiss lace curtains. Every room also had the latest technologies- a telephone, a buzzer for calling maids and waiters and a magnet brand clock, known for its precise timekeeping.
Today's residents and guests have their own taste of the Gilded Age. Following a three-year, $400 million renovation, the Plaza reopened in 2009 with 282 hotel rooms and 181 apartments filled with decadent details including 24-karat gold-plated faucets; mosaic-floored bathrooms and white-gloved butlers assigned to each floor and available around the clock.
