| |
About The Pierre, 795 Fifth Avenue
Although the Plaza Hotel dominated the southeast gateway to Central Park for about two decades before this hotel and the Sherry-Netherland hotel, two blocks south on the avenue and erected two years before this was completed in 1929, quickly became two of the most recognized profiles in the world.
The easily recognizable silhouettes of the skyscraper hotels were instant, albeit unofficial, landmarks that marked the epicenter of elegance in Manhattan.
Until the incursion of the mammoth and overshadowing General Motors Building, which replaced the very impressive Savoy-Plaza Hotel, designed by McKim, Mead & White, directly across 59th Street from the Sherry Netherland, these properties along with the nearby Plaza Hotel and the Bergdorf Goodman store created the city's most impressive and distinctive urban "square."
The Pierre and the Sherry Netherland are quite different. The Pierre is light colored and the Sherry Netherland is dark. The Pierre has a green mansard-style roof and the Sherry Netherland has an elaborate minaret. Both have slender shafts rising from fairly large bases and both were designed by Schultze & Weaver, the architectural firm that designed the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue in 1931.
Because the Plaza was older and more established and had far larger and far more spectacular interiors than the rest of this group of hotels, the Pierre and the Sherry Netherland hotels have not shared as much limelight despite their far greater visibility. As elegant as the area was before their arrival, the hotels, nevertheless, incredibly enhanced the prestige of this district with their towering presence and romantic silhouettes, giving hope, realized decades later when design styles had changed markedly, that the Plaza District might become Manhattan's third major skyline district after Lower Manhattan and 42nd Street.
Although the silhouette of the Sherry Netherland is infinitely more memorable and dramatic and interesting than the Pierre's, the Pierre's more conventional formality and light tones made for a more compatible transition with the white mansions of "Millionaire's Row" north of it on the avenue that were already being razed to make way for expensive apartment buildings.
Furthermore, in an age when contextual design had not yet reared its wagging head in architectural circles, the Pierre's light colors were more appropriate as a backdrop for its very impressive small neighbor on the same Fifth Avenue block, the stunning Metropolitan Club.
(Quality architecture in the city in the 1960's and 1970's was a rarity as evidenced sadly by the bland apartment buildings at 800 Fifth Avenue, across 61st Street from the Pierre, and 775 Fifth Avenue, across 60th Street from the Metropolitan Club. Ulrich Franzen & Associates and Wechsler & Schimenti were the architects of 800 Fifth Avenue, whose rear facade facing an utterly unnecessary, large, heavily fenced garden plaza is far better than its pedestrian frontage across from Central Park. The incongruous rear plaza was perhaps some misguided city planner's brainstorm to recall the walled in, unattended gardens of the former Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Georgian-style red-brick mansion that formerly occupied, rather dourly, this large important site. Mrs. Dodge, a niece of John D. Rockefeller, had been married to Marcellus Hartley Dodge, the chairman of the Remington Arms Company, and was known as the "first lady of dogdom" and had founded, with her husband, the Morris and Essex Kennel Club in New Jersey and their estate, Giralda Farms in Madison, N.J., was the scene of many important dog shows. Over the years she acquired several adjacent brownstones and tore them down letting the foliage grow wild next to her austere 61st Street 35-room mansion filled mostly with animal paintings.)
In "Fifth Avenue, A Very Social History," (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1978), Kate Simon recounts some of the Pierre Hotel's early history:
"Ambitious and tenacious, like many of his fellow Corsicans, Charles Pierre Casalesco left his father's Ajaccio restaurant where he had been the busboy, to go as Charles Pierre to the brilliant Hotel Anglais in Monte Carlo....On a job foray to London, he was picked out by Louis Sherry for a position in New York. Twelve years of Sherry's brought him to an impasse. Smart women were beginning to smoke in public rooms. Mr. Sherry forbade it in his restaurant, an irritating, old-fashioned prohibition, Pierre thought, and, after flights of heated words he left. A stint then at the Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue at Forty-sixth, followed by his own restaurant, first on Forty-fifth immediately west of Fifth Avenue, and later at 230 Park, a place equally famous for its cuisine and for its care of American heiresses who, it was seen to by M. Pierre (himself occasionally the escort) went directly home to Mama. Inevitably he became a conservative elder statesman, deploring the vast democratic size of World War I parties and the unrestrained Prohibition guzzling that followed after. He soldiered on in this frantic new world that had lost its manners until a group of admirers and financiers, among them Otto H. Kahn, Finley J. Shepherd (who had married Helen Gould), Edward F. Hutton, Walter P. Chrysler, Robert Livingston Gerry (the son of Elbridge Thomas Gerry, lawyer, philanthropist and grandson of Elbridge Gerry, the inventor of 'gerrymandering') and others decided to use the site of the Gerry mansion at Sixty-first Street and Fifth Avenue for a hotel to be managed and run by Charles Pierre. The new structure, rising forty-two stories, could hardly keep the Richard Hunt chateau quality of the pink mansion it replaced, but a few old France touches were built into the hotel whose motto was 'from this place hope beams.'"
The Depression took its toll, however, and the hotel went into bankruptcy in 1932. Six years later, oilman J. Paul Getty bought it for about $2.5 million in 1938 and subsequently sold many cooperative apartments in the building. (Seventy of the hotel's units were converted to cooperative apartments in 1959.) The hotel's operations changed hands a few times until Trust Houses Forte Corporation took it over in 1973 and finally the Four Seasons luxury hotel chain in 1986.
(Having sold his townhouse for the new hotel, Elbridge T. Gerry bought a Georgian-style townhouse on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 94th Street from Mrs. Leonard K. Elmhirst, who, according to Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins in their book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," published in 1987 by Rizzoli, "stipulated that it not be demolished. Mrs. Elmhirst was Dorothy Payne Whitney Strait, one of the country's leading heiresses, suffragettes and a founder of the Junior League whose first husband, Willard Strait, had founded The New Republic magazine. She and her late husband, Mr. Elmhirst founded and operated Dartington Hall, a very progressive school and cultural center in England. The Fifth Avenue building eventually became the International Museum of Photography.)
In 1988, the Pierre's duplex penthouse with an enormous ballroom with double-height arched windows, was put on the market with the highest price tag ever believed then asked for a single co-op - $20 million. A couple years later, it was sold to Lady Fairfax for about $12 million, and the July 27, 1998 issue of The New York Observer reported it had been sold to Thomas O'Gara, vice chairman of the Kroll-O'Gara Company, which is based in Fairfield, Ohio, for close to $25 million, but later said that he was not the buyer. The August 31, 1998 Neal Travis' New York column in The New York Post, reported that "the actual price paid by an unidentified American buyer was $35 million. "Lady Mary, heir to a depleted Australian newspaper fortune, has done quite nicely on the deal, even if owning the pad never did gain her the social acceptance she so fiercely sought. Fairfax had paid $12 million fo the place in 1990, spent about $6 million doing it up, and overed the $30,000-a-month maintenance by sealing off the bottom floor and renting it out," Travis wrote. Weeks later, however, reports were that the deal fell through and the penthouse was again on the market.
The ballroom, which had served for a while as a supper club, had been rented for parties over the years but had long been not in use as the hotel had redone its main public spaces in its base where it had another ballroom as well as a circular double-height lounge with a painted mural that included a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The penthouse ballroom, with views in all directions, large mirrors etched with palm trees, a small bandstand and some peeling pink paint when it was offered in 1988, can hold 285 people at once, according to a Fire Department sign that then hung on a wall. It is approximately 50 by 85 feet. It had not been used as a ballroom since 1973. The New York Observer article noted that the building's coop apartment owners "didn't want the rent-a-ballroom wedding parties tramping around in their elevators, so they made the Pierre close the ballroom, and it spent the next 15 years as a storage room for hotel furniture." The article also said that Lady Fairfax "put $5 million into renovation" of the five-bedroom penthouse. A hotel employee said that the views from its small corner terraces were so grand that they had been used as lookouts by the Police Department. The views, in fact, from its terraces are grand. In 1994, the building announced it would have to replace its three-story-high copper roof, but since the building is within the Upper East Side Historic District and therefore a landmark the new roof did not alter the hotel's appearance. The hotel originally had 714 guest rooms, but many of them were combined into larger suites over the years.
The Pierre Hotel's Fifth Avenue entrance, under a white and gold canopy, is very disappointing as the main entrance is really on the sidestreet. The Fifth Avenue entrance leads up a few stairs to the elevator bank and also has stairs leading down to a restaurant. A pleasant window-less, street-level cafe has its own Fifth Avenue entrance. The main sidestreet entrance opens onto a pleasant lobby with a raised alcove, but it is rather restrained and not spectacular, similar to the lobby treatment at the Hotel Carlyle on Madison Avenue at 76th Street.
The hotel's tower is marred somewhat by repairs to its corners over the years and much of its south facade is blank because of the placement of the elevator bank.
In the late 1980's, the adjacent Metropolitan Club contemplated erected an apartment tower in the unused air space over its large midblock driveway and courtyard and its east wing. The tower would have abutted the Pierre's tower but been several stories lower as well as set back a bit from its western edge. The very handsome plan, however, was not approved by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The Pierre has fabulous views and a magnificent location.
|
