By Terry Trucco
Celebratory butter cream with chocolate filling.
Not many guests check into hotels long term unless you count inventor Nikola Tesla, who lived for a decade at The New Yorker, or Cole Porter, who stayed for years at the Waldorf (the hotel lent him a grand piano).
Staff members are another matter. Two or three decades of service are not unusual at large New York hotels. But five decades? (more…)
By Terry
Times Square as seen from R Lounge.
This is what Times Square looks like from a window table at R Lounge, the Renaissance New York’s second-floor restaurant and bar with the flashy address – Two Times Square. Talk about the thick of things.
It’s one of those wow-I’m-in-New York! views, up there with the dining room at Helmsley Park Lane (Central Park), the roof bars at the Kimberly (Chrysler Building), the Bentley (East River), the James (lower Manhattan) and the Gansevoort Meatpacking District (Hudson River) and the revolving roof restaurant at the Marriott Marquis (the entire city).
And miraculously, when we stopped by mid-afternoon this week we had the room all to outselves, save for a woman with a broken leg seated by a window. “Sit anywhere you like,” said the greeter. (more…)
By Terry
Yotel's Yobot -- $2 per bag.
We’ll never know the identity of the enterprising employee who cleared his throat, stared down a guest and was remunerated for carrying a bag. But by the 1820s tipping the porter, like signing the register, was a ritual at hotels in New York and other big American cities.
Blame it on the buildings. Carrying bags wasn’t a problem for guests staying at small, squat colonial inns and taverns. But hotel architecture changed in the 1790s, with the advent of full-fledged hotels with complicated floor plans, writes A.K. Sandoval-Strausz in Hotel, An American History, a fascinating look at the evolution of the hotel. (more…)
By Terry
Erin Markey and Adam Couperthwaite in Green Eyes.
It’s not news when a hotel room serves as a backdrop for a movie or photo shoot. But a play?
Welcome to Room 620 at the Hudson hotel. As noted previously here, Green Eyes, a rarely seen one-act by Tennessee Williams, written in 1970 and published in 2008, is performed in this snug little suite through January 23. Fortunately for claustrophobic types, the play is short – just 35 minutes – with just two characters, a warring pair of newlyweds honeymooning in a seedy New Orleans hotel room. (more…)
By Terry
King King in Gingerbread
Ever wondered how King Kong perched on top of the Empire State Building might look rendered in gingerbread?
Can’t say we ever did, either. But King Kong is just one of seven movies interpreted in grand-scale gingerbread in the second annual holiday gingerbread exhibition at Le Parker Meridien hotel. And the result – an Art Deco gingerbread skyscraper with a frosted ape balanced atop a fondant finial – is scrumptious.
For this year’s contest, teams from local bakeries, sweets trucks and restaurants fashioned gingerbread creations celebrating movies made in New York. The goods (or perhaps we should say goodies) are on view through January 9, and they’re yummy. West Side Story is depicted by the Treats Truck in gingerbread tenements, “Sharks” and “Jets” scrawled in icing on the walls. (more…)
By Terry
Standard canstruction.
Q. When is a can of tuna more than just a can of tuna?
A. When it’s grouped with more than 4,000 others to create a grand-scale sculpture of New York’s Standard Hotel, aka The Candard Hotel.
Huh?
Explainer: Each year at Thanksgiving the nation-wide Canstruction competition challenges designers to think up clever ways to fashion sculptures, the wittier the better, out of food cans. The edible creations go on display for a week or so before being dismantled and distributed to the needy. (more…)
By Terry
We find it really hard to get excited about a new banking product, even when there’s a hotel connection. But we can see the appeal of a new credit card that made its debut yesterday.
Use the Hyatt Chase Visa card just once, and you get two free nights at any Hyatt property in the world, including New York outposts like the shiny new Andaz hotels on Wall Street and Fifth Avenue. (more…)
