Posted Mar 2, 2023, 11:41 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 52,814
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There’s a lengthy piece on the hotel in the Times….
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/n...vania-nyc.html
Once the World’s Largest, a Hotel Goes ‘Poof!’ Before Our Eyes
The Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan was a virtual city within a city. But in the end, nothing could save it.
By Dan Barry
March 2, 2023
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Bit by bit, floor by floor, the building that once rose 22 stories over Penn Station is shrinking before the city’s very eyes. The black netting draped over its ever-diminishing brick is like a magician’s handkerchief; once removed, it will reveal — nothing.
Behold: The Great Disappearing Act of the Hotel Pennsylvania.
This isn’t — or wasn’t — just any building. This was once the largest hotel on earth, with 2,200 rooms, shops, restaurants, its own newspaper, and a telephone number immortalized by the bandleader Glenn Miller with a 1940 song “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” for which the complete original lyrics are:
Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand
Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand
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…..But the Hotel Pennsylvania never quite had the cachet of the Plaza or the Waldorf Astoria. It came to depend on traveling salespeople, conventions devoted to dentistry or footwear, and tourists seeking affordable accommodations. In recent years, perhaps the most charitable review was: conveniently located.
In 2008, a hard pass by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission effectively sentenced the hotel to the same fate as the building it was designed to complement: the majestic Pennsylvania Station, the egregious razing of which in 1963 led to the creation of a city agency charged with protecting buildings of historic and cultural significance: the Landmarks Preservation Commission, of course.
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…..For two decades, the building’s owner, the real-estate behemoth Vornado Realty Trust, dithered about its plans (We’re knocking it down. No, we’re renovating! We’re knocking it down.) before moving ahead with demolition. A supertall office tower might replace it, or maybe a casino.
Some preservationists considered the hotel to be pedestrian and not worth saving. “Even if you’re a hard-core preservationist, your energies might be better spent elsewhere,” the city editor of New York magazine wrote in 2021.
Others disagreed, including Michael Devonshire, a preservation architect, a longtime member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and son of a certain soldier, James Devonshire, who found comfort once at the Hotel Pennsylvania. “I cannot think of a building more worthy of designation as a landmark,” he said. “Are you kidding me?”
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…..In early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic forced the Hotel Pennsylvania to close, which proved to be convenient to its owners. In announcing the inevitable a year later, Mr. Roth described the hotel as “decades past its glory and sell-by date.”
The Landmarks Preservation Commission seemed to agree. A commission spokeswoman said last month that the agency “has reviewed Hotel Pennsylvania numerous times over the last 20 years and determined each time that the property does not rise to the level of architectural significance necessary as a potential landmark.”
By this point, the Hotel Pennsylvania Preservation Society was just Mr. Lepore. The reality that the 22-story building was about to be removed from the cityscape didn’t hit him until he walked into the closed hotel for a liquidation sale. As he pored over leftovers of hospitality, looking for relics worth purchasing for posterity, a deep sadness came over him. He felt like a failed caretaker.
“In my head I was saying, ‘Sorry, I did everything I could,’” he recalled. “‘I’m sorry you’re going to be erased from the world.’
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