Save the Plaza
There’s long been speculation that the Plaza Hotel would close its doors. Hotels don’t seem to have a very long shelf life these days. New amenities are rolled out by competitors, new audio-visual and networking technologies are introduced, new demands are made of conference and banquet space. New hotels can build for the modern marketplace, but older hotels have to pay a fortune to be retro-fit. Add to that the usual wear and tear that a hotel goes through (carpets wear thin, wallpaper fades and let’s not talk about those mysterious stains that turn up in the strangest places), and you wind up with the need for a hotel to close operations for top-to-bottom renovations every couple of decades. Many hotels decide to forgo the renovations. They close down, tear down, go condo. The Mayflower, the Stanhope and the Regent Wall Street are just a few of the hotels that […]