“The greatest of them all.” That’s how hotelier Conrad Hilton described the Waldorf Astoria New York.
It was a hotel, he said, that was “the most important in the world, the original luxury property and the place where luxury service was perfected”.
And now, the Hilton-run Park Avenue hotel that also gave the world a timeless salad, has reopened after an eight-year refurbishment costing $2 billion.
It’s truly a hotel that’s a tourist attraction in its own right — and one that was originally two adjacent hotels, the Waldorf Hotel and the Astoria Hotel, run by two feuding cousins who were Fifth Avenue neighbors.
The 13-story Waldorf Hotel went up first, built in 1893 by William Waldorf Astor in place of his demolished home.
His cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, described it as a “glorified tavern”, but was jealous enough to demolish his own four-story dwelling and build on the plot the 17-story Astoria Hotel, which opened its doors to guests in 1897.
The properties weren’t separate for long, though.
In that same year, the cousins resolved their disagreements and merged the two hotels into one.
The then-hyphenated Waldorf-Astoria threw open its doors, with the two buildings connected by a 300-foot-long marble thoroughfare that earned the moniker “Peacock Alley” because fashionable guests enjoyed parading up and down it.
Astor died in the Titanic disaster in 1912 as the world’s wealthiest man, having amassed a fortune from real-estate development of around $3.5billion in today’s money.
William, meanwhile, moved to England with his family shortly after the Waldorf-Astoria opened and died in 1919.
They left behind a hotel that would become legendary.
Though there was a blip in 1929 when it was demolished to make way for the Empire State Building and rebuilt at its current 301 Park Avenue address.
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