Well folks, we have reached the grand finale. Standing right here, looking at those elegant white brick walls and that green tiled mansard roof, which is the French-style sloping roof up top, you are facing the undisputed king of New York hospitality, The Plaza Hotel.
Take a peek at your app to see how more than a century of development has risen around the timeless French Renaissance-style facade of the Plaza Hotel, transforming the quiet carriage-filled streets of nineteen oh eight into the bustling modern metropolis of today. The Plaza opened its doors in nineteen oh seven with a staggering price tag of twelve and a half million dollars, which is roughly four hundred million dollars today. And from day one, it was a magnet for scandal and spectacle. Just weeks after it opened, the British actress Missus Patrick Campbell caused an absolute uproar by doing the unthinkable. She lit a perfumed Egyptian cigarette in the dining room. When the headwaiter demanded she put it out, because women smoking in public was a severe etiquette breach at the time, she shot back, my good man, I understand this is a free country. I shall do nothing to change it. Management eventually compromised by putting privacy screens around her table.
The Plaza was also home to some incredibly eccentric full-time residents. Take Princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy, a Hungarian painter who moved into a fourteen-room suite in nineteen oh nine. She brought along a massive entourage and a pet lion cub named Goldfleck, who mostly lived in her oversized bathtub.
Over the years, ownership changed hands multiple times. When Donald Trump bought the property in nineteen eighty-eight, his wife Ivana ran it with a famous iron fist, insisting every lemon wedge be cut to precise specifications. But Trump met his match in Fannie Lowenstein, an elderly widow living in a rent-controlled suite for just five hundred dollars a month. Known to the staff as the Eloise from Hell, Fannie constantly called city inspectors complaining that indoor air pollution was shrinking her curtains. Trump finally negotiated peace by giving her a massive suite, new furniture, and a free personal maid for life.
The hotel has also seen its share of history-making protests. Check out your screen for a look at the heavy wood doors of the Oak Room. In nineteen sixty-nine, feminist icon Betty Friedan and other members of the National Organization for Women staged a sit-in there to protest the hotel's men-only lunch policy. Waiters actually physically lifted the table away, leaving the women sitting in an empty circle on the floor until the stock exchange closed at three PM. The terrible publicity forced the hotel to drop the policy four months later.
As we wrap up our tour right here, just steps from where author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda once supposedly took a midnight swim in the Pulitzer Fountain, take a long look at this beautiful chateau. Thank you for walking the streets of Midtown East with me. It has been a true pleasure sharing these spectacular New York stories with you.
