Hotel name | Waldorf-Astoria |
---|---|
Image width | 250 |
Location | 301 Park AvenueNew York City, New York |
Pushpin map | United States Manhattan |
Pushpin mapsize | 250 |
Coordinates type | region:US-NY_type:landmark |
Coordinates display | title |
Opening date | 1893 (Waldorf Hotel)1897 (Astoria Hotel) |
Architect | Schultze & WeaverLee S Jablin, Harman Jablin Architects |
Operator | The Waldorf=Astoria Collection |
Owner | Hilton Worldwide |
Number of restaurants | Peacock AlleyBull and Bear SteakhouseOscar's Brasserie |
Number of rooms | 1,508 |
Floors | 47 |
Height | |
Website | www.WaldorfNewYork.com |
Footnotes | 2594 |
The Waldorf-Astoria is a luxury hotel in New York. It has been housed in two historic landmark buildings in New York City. The first, designed by architect Henry J. Hardenbergh, was on the Fifth Avenue site of the Empire State Building. The present building at 301 Park Avenue in Manhattan is a 47-story, Art Deco landmark, designed by architects Schultze and Weaver and dating from 1931. Lee S Jablin, Harman Jablin Architects, fully renovated and upgraded the historical property to its original grandeur during the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. The Waldorf Astoria New York is a member of Hilton's Luxury and Lifestyle Brands along with Waldorf Astoria Hotels and Resorts and Conrad Hotels & Resorts.
Waldorf-Astoria was the first hotel to offer room service, making a huge impact for the future of the hotel industry. Luxury was the brand they sought after.
The hotel is now branded as the Waldorf=Astoria, with a double hyphen, but originally a single hyphen was employed between "Waldorf" and "Astoria," as recalled by a popular expression and song, "Meet Me at the Hyphen."
The modern hotel has three American and classic European restaurants, and a beauty parlor located off the main lobby. Several boutiques surround the lobby. A "hotel within a hotel" in its upper section is known as The Waldorf Towers, operated by Conrad Hotels & Resorts.
The hotel has its own railway platform as part of Grand Central Terminal, used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, James Farley, Adlai Stevenson, and Douglas MacArthur, among others. An elevator large enough for Franklin D. Roosevelt's automobile provides access to the platform.
Its name is ultimately derived from Walldorf in Germany and the prominent German-American Astor family that originated there.
An Astor family feud contributed to the events which led to the construction of the original Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue.
It started as two hotels: one owned by William Waldorf Astor, whose 13-story Waldorf Hotel was opened in 1893 and the other owned by his cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, called the Astoria Hotel and opened four years later in 1897, four stories higher.
William Astor, motivated in part by a dispute with his aunt, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, built the original Waldorf Hotel next door to her house, on the site of his father's mansion and today's Empire State Building. The hotel was built to the specifications of founding proprietor George Boldt; he and his wife Louise had become known as the owners and operators of the Bellevue, an elite boutique hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Broad Street, subsequently expanded and renamed the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. Boldt continued to own the Bellevue (and, later, the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel) even after his relationship with the Astors blossomed.
William Astor's construction of a hotel next to his aunt's house worsened his feud with her, but, with Boldt's help, John Astor persuaded his mother to move uptown. John Astor then built the Astoria Hotel and leased it to Boldt. The hotels were initially built as two separate structures, but Boldt planned the Astoria so it could be connected to the Waldorf by Peacock Alley. The combined Waldorf=Astoria became the largest hotel in the world at the time, while maintaining the original Waldorf's high standards.
The Waldorf=Astoria is historically significant for transforming the contemporary hotel, then a facility for transients, into a social center of the city as well as a prestigious destination for visitors and a part of popular culture. The Waldorf=Astoria was influential in advancing the status of women, who were admitted singly without escorts. Founding proprietor, George C. Boldt, became wealthy and prominent internationally, if not so much a popular celebrity as his famous employee, Oscar Tschirky, "Oscar of the Waldorf." Boldt built one of America's most ambitious houses, Boldt Castle, on one of the Thousand Islands. George Boldt's wife, Louise Kehrer Boldt, was influential in evolving the idea of the grand urban hotel as a social center, particularly in making it appealing to women as a venue for social events.
When the new skyscraper Waldorf=Astoria was built over air-rights of The New York State Realty and Terminal Company on Park Avenue, under the guidance of Lucius M. Boomer, the manager of the old Waldorf, a cast of furnishers and decorators with good reputations was assembled, to give it a grand yet domestic atmosphere. Lucius M. Boomer had retired to Florida after the old Waldorf= Astoria was demolished, but he retained exclusive rights to use the name "Waldorf=Astoria", which he transferred to the new hotel. Boomer died in an airplane crash during 1947 and Conrad Hilton bought the Waldorf=Astoria in 1949.
In November 2008, a referendum in Beverly Hills, California was voted on to determine whether developer Oasis West Realty LLC will be allowed to expand the nine-acre site of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, recently owned by the late Merv Griffin, at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. Expansion plans include removing some buildings and adding an 8-story condo, a Waldorf-Astoria named 12-story hotel, and another 18-story condo tower. The Beverly Hills City Council had approved the $500 million project by a 3-2 vote. Local resident opponents led by a group called Citizens Right to Decide Committee gathered enough signatures to place the referendum on the November 4, 2008, ballot with the argument "It's Just Too Big." Los Angeles County election officials reported a week after the vote that local Measure H was losing by 68 votes, with provisional ballots yet to be counted. On December 2, 2008, yes on H passed by 129 votes. Yes: 7972. No: 7834.
Postmaster General James Farley occupied two adjoining suites in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers during his tenure as the Chairman of the Board of Coca-Cola's International division from 1940 until his death in 1976, arguably one of the landmark's longest housed tenants.
Category:Art Deco buildings in New York City Category:Astor family Category:Hotels in Manhattan Category:Destroyed landmarks in the United States Category:Hilton hotels Category:Luxury brands Category:Skyscrapers in New York City Category:Skyscrapers between 150 and 199 meters Category:Hotels established in 1893 Category:Railway hotels in the United States Category:Skyscraper hotels in the United States Category:Presidential homes in the United States
ca:Waldorf-Astoria de:Waldorf-Astoria es:Waldorf-Astoria eo:Waldorf-Astoria eu:Waldorf-Astoria Hotel fa:هتل والدورف-آستوریا fr:Waldorf-Astoria it:Waldorf-Astoria Hotel he:מלון וולדורף אסטוריה ka:ვალდორფ-ასტორია nl:Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ja:ウォルドルフ=アストリア pl:Hotel Waldorf-Astoria pt:Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ro:Waldorf-Astoria Hotel fi:Waldorf-Astoria Hotel sv:Waldorf-Astoria zh:华道夫-阿斯多里亚酒店This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The World News (WN) Network, has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to user privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for wn.com, as well as e-mail newsletters.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you, except when you provide it to us. For example, if you submit an inquiry to us or sign up for our newsletter, you may be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details (name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.).
When you submit your personally identifiable information through wn.com, you are giving your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. If you would prefer that we not collect any personally identifiable information from you, please do not provide us with any such information. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to third parties without your consent, except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.