‘The greatest of them all’

New York's legendary Waldorf Astoria reopens

- Story by Julie Satow / NYT

New York is a city filled with grand hotels, including the Plaza, the St. Regis and the Carlyle. But for nearly a decade, perhaps its most famous hotel, the Waldorf Astoria, home of Peacock Alley and a namesake salad of fruit and nuts, has been shuttered, its art deco facade obscured behind green plywood scaffolding.

Following an ownership change, a pandemic and a painstaking renovation, the hotel reopened its doors to guests last week.

"The Waldorf has always been a reflection of New York," said David Freeland, a historian and the author of American Hotel: The Waldorf-Astoria And The Making Of A Century. "I'd like to think that its reopening symbolises the return of a great public space within the life of the city."

First constructed as two hotels, the Waldorf and the Astoria, on adjoining lots just below 34th Street on Fifth Avenue, the hotel closed in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building. A few months later — and just days before that year's Wall Street crash — the owners struck a deal to move to its current location, a full block between 49th and 50th streets, from Park Avenue to Lexington Avenue.

In 1931, the Waldorf-Astoria (the hotel dropped the hyphen in 2009) reopened as a 47-storey limestone skyscraper with twin decorative copper spires and nearly 2,000 rooms, each outfitted with a speaker on which guests could listen to goings-on in the hotel's Grand Ballroom, where Frank Sinatra sang, Albert Einstein spoke and gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell held elaborate parties. At one, the April in Paris Ball, door prizes included a full-length mink coat and a diamond necklace, and Maxwell made her entrance on the back of an elephant.