American History Hit - A History of New York in 3 Hotels

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

The Waldorf-Astoria, the Plaza and the Algonquin all tell their own stories of New York City. Don talks to Anthony Melchiorri, host of Travel Channel's Hotel Impossible, about the histories of these hotels. How they reflect the city they were built in and how that has changed around them.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft in a midtown hotel.

No air moves in and out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by the emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed. Five blocks from the publisher's office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose. Four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle. 34 blocks from the street where Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, and 13 blocks from where Harry Shaw shot Samford White. And for that matter, I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and memorable characters sat in.

Some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private, and full of their own emanations from without. Those words are from the opening paragraphs of a famous essay written in 1948 by Elwyn Brooks White, E.B. White, best known for books like Stuart Little and Charlotte's Webb. The essay is called Here Is New York, which he wrote, as he mentions, from a stultifying hotel room. It was the Algonquin Hotel. This is another time in New York, another era, pre-air conditioning, certainly, when hotel rooms in Midtown Manhattan were actually affordable and a place like the Algonquin could have its own particular personality and clientele. Today, the Algonquin still stands where it's always been at 44th Street right off of 6th, but it's changed ownership so many times, and this is true of all of Gotham's greatest hotels still with us, the Plaza, the St. Regis, Shurie Netherland, and maybe greatest of them all, the Waldorf Astoria. These cultural landmarks of luxury have always been the core of the Big Apple, setting the bar for an urban experience unlike any other anywhere in the world.

It's New York. It's hotel history, and I love it. So I phoned up my friend and colleague, Anthony Melchiori, to help me tell the stories. Many know Anthony as the meticulous and discriminating hospitality expert on travel channels Hotel Impossible, but his stature in the industry stretches far beyond that role. He's in demand as a consultant and speaker all over the world. Anthony Melchiori, so great to have you on American History Hit. Hello. It is great to be here talking about my favorite subject. Andy, we talked the other day and you mentioned something I never knew about your career. You were the general manager of the Algonquin Hotel, some like 18 years ago, right? Yes. The Ogunquin Hotel was my second general manager job and really the job that propelled me into my career, really, really set the stage because it was a very complicated hotel, even though it was a smaller hotel, had a lot of challenges.

It goes without saying the personalities who make up the hotel staff. are reflective of the personalities of these hotels. I mean, that's your stock and trade. That's what you do for a living, consulting in these hotels. 100%. And the O'Gonquin is a legend. It was cool before the word cool was invented. It was a lobby hotel before lobby hotels were invented.

What does that mean, lobby hotel? The rooms aren't the biggest rooms you'll ever find, but when you go to the lobby, you have a playground. You have a restaurant. You have a bar. You had a jazz club. The Oakroom Cabaret was the Master Square Garden and Cabaretes. It had everybody from Peter Sacani to Diana Crowell to all of them.

All the greats played that room. Let's first broadly explain why we're doing this conversation. New York City is really a town of hotels. The interesting idea behind this is that, you know, America is a non-aristocratic state, apparently, sort of middle-class country. There are no castles or manor houses here. So when New York starts to advance any of these cities, really start to advance in the gilded age especially, these hotels kind of fill in the gap.

They create these sort of environments where you can have the big banquets and the big celebrations. And especially in New York, they really stamp the life and culture of the place. So we're going to talk about a couple of these hotels that epitomize that identity of New York. The Algonquin Hotel, the Plaza Hotel, two of which are on your resume, incredibly. And then the Waldorf Astoria, which is sort of the biggest, most famous story of them all. So let's start with the Algonquin. I want to talk about this as a very peculiarly interesting hotel because it was very literary, right from the get-go, correct?

100%. Frank Case, who was the general manager of the hotel, was in love with theater. And when the hotel was built and created, it was the same time the theater started to come into Times Square. So all of these actors and all of these theater people, all these writers needed a home. and Frank Case was more than willing to give them a home. That's how the roundtable started, and that's how it became a literary hotel, because he reached out to them, and he appreciated them, and really was their biggest cheerleader. I mean, first of all, New York was a lot cheaper in the day.

The Algonquin opens in 1902. It's right on 44th Street, which is also known as Club Row, even to this day. By the way, my favorite block in New York, anybody who's visiting that city, needs to walk down 44th Street towards Grand Central because you'll run into the New York Yacht Club, the Harvard Club, the Cornell Club, all these different places. I have a subscription to the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesman Library, which is almost directly across from the Algonquin. And then there's the Algonquin and the Iroquois, these famous hotels there.

It's a really unique environment that has a completely different vibe than the rest of the city, very kind of studied and mature, I would say. So this hotel Algonquin has started there, and he very very, consciously reaches out to writers and playwrights and so forth, he pays train fares, he offers free meals, and the price of rooms are very low. It's like $2 a night there. Yes. And when you say offered meals, what he gave them is celery, radishes, some tomatoes, some water. And when the roundtable started, and all these, whether be Gene Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and the Ferber, when they all started to get together, they had no money. No one knew who they were. They all

became famous little by little, basically at the same time. And if you ever see the red rope at a club, that red rope was started by Frank Case. He put a red rope around that table to keep all the viewers out because they were really the internet of their day. If they said something, they wrote something, they acted on Broadway, everybody was listening. I started this episode with a reading from Here is New York, E.B. White's famous essay. That was written, apparently, in a hotel room at the Algonquin. He would have been. staying at the Algonquin because right nearby were the offices of the New Yorker magazine. The New Yorker was begun at the Algonquin by Harold Ross.

And Jane Grant, is that right? Well, yes. And matter of fact, that's where all the writers started writing. So whether it be Robert Benchley, who wrote for them, he was kind of a catalyst to everybody's success because he gave them a purpose and a place to write. And of course, Robert Benchley and Edna Furb. and all of them, they all kind of fell off each other. But there wasn't always polite.

Some of those lunches were pretty intense. Dorothy Parker was the famous acerbic wit of the bunch. I wish I could reel off Dorothy Parker quotes. I can't. I can. Go for it. I love a martini, two at the most, three and one to the table, four them under the host.

That's literally my favorite. The funny thing about those quotes was when I was the general manager, I said, why don't we have them on Cocktail Map? and everyone loved them. And we didn't sell them. We just gave them away. And one day I'm sitting in my office and I get an envelope from the NAACP. And they say cease and desist on the cocktail napkins because they owned the estate of Dorothy

Parker. When she passed away, she gave her estate to Martin Luther King. When he passed away, he gave his estate to NACP. And they told me, you cannot use it because we have the rights to it. my lawyers looked at it and they said, no, it's open domain. We can use them, so we kept on using it. The cat. We're talking about the early 20th century, but when I got to New York in the 80s and 90s, I used to go in there and order a drink. Little did I know you would have been around. I used to sit in that place and pretend that I had any kind of money and influence, and this cat

would go through my legs all the time. Yeah, that was Matilda the cat. She came in in 1907. Frank Case adopted her and she never left. And when Matilda leaves this earth, then we get another Matilda. Or if it's a male cat, we get Hamlet. It's just a vibe. And that's the thing about New York. You know, I'm a big New York guy, and I just vibe on the place all the time. But part of it is that you can walk past a building, and that building either holds your

own experiences or famous others within it. And if you've been there for any amount of time, sooner or later, there are so many of those buildings that you end up walking around just sort of vibing your own experience and others all the time. And that's what it's like on the streets of New York. Algonquin is classic that way. As the general manager, I'm sitting there one day and I'm doing a radio show, okay, with Bill Bonano, with other famous people in the city. And we have a off-wordway play in the oak room called Talk of the Town. And we have Harry Conant Jr. playing the next night in the Oak Room. And we have all kinds of writers in the lobby. And we have famous A-list celebrities hiding in the corner because

that's where they go to get away from everyone. And so this one little lobby is handling a radio show, a famous singer, a off-roadway play, and A-list celebrities hanging out in the corner. Ryan Seacrest, when he was first coming up, he would hide in the corners of the O'Gonlequin. And when you write a book or you're about to launch a book or a play, you come to the O'Gonquin, you have a drink, and you pray to the literary gods that your play or book will be successful. So that's what the O'Gonquin means to New York City.

If you're a writer, you know this hotel. Also, the American Bar Association is right across the street. So the Supreme Court Justice one day comes in with a bunch of people and asks for a tour of the hotel. And we bring them through the O'Gonquin. They were so interested in the history of the El Galkland. So it really is a playground.

You can stay there and never have to leave. It is the consummate New York City setting. If you're interested in literature, theater, and the arts, that place has that feeling. That's what's interesting to me is that these hotels tell the story of New York through the buildings. Your later resume takes you to the Plaza Hotel. Okay, so just in general speaking, the story is told of New York because it develops. The real estate sort of moves up the island. New York begins way at the bottom with the Dutch community and all those wiggly streets.

And then suddenly, you know, you're at 14th Street and things get very gritty. And that was all by design. It had to do with the shipping industry and so forth. But it also created a whole new way of operating in New York. And as real estate moved along 30s, 40s, 50s, all those streets are developed. These hotels start popping up accordingly. It's like the Dakota. You know, the Dakota was put way uptown kind of in anticipation.

of Central Park being developed, literally called the Dakota because it was way up in the northwest territories of Manhattan Island in those days. It's really funny. It's like the restaurant where you get seated in Siberia. This was way up there, but on purpose, because it was always an outpost of real estate development. That's an interesting side of hotels, which people don't realize. In my understanding, hotels work this way. You develop this property, you build it, you hope that it pays for itself. It's also a real estate deal. You've planted yourself in the place and over time the neighborhood comes up because the hotel brings it up. And when you sell that hotel, you've sold a more valuable property. Is that the business plan in essence? The Ococan

Hotel was feeding literally the lions of Broadway and it was housing them. So as it developed, the hotel developed, same thing with the Plaza Hotel. When the Plaza Hotel was built, those mansions were starting to be built. The Vanderbilts were the richest people in our country and they were using that as their second home. Matter of fact, they were, the first guest to ever check into that hotel. There is a photo of the registration book with their signature. So the theater started using it as really housing and just trying to stay alive on Broadway, whereas the plaza, it was used as their second home, if you would, simply because it was their escape. They used it for their weddings. They used it for their social events. They used it to be seen.

Matter of fact, years later, when they redesigned it, they came up with these high back chairs, And it kind of hid you in the chair. So the thought from the designer was, well, people want to stay away from the glitin and the glamour and they just want to have the conversation. And the socialites revolted. And so no, no, no, no, we come here to be seen. And they had to get rid of those chairs. So the plaza was a place to be seen.

The Beatles were there. Marilyn Monroe was there. There was a gentleman named Fred Christina that was Demetre D. He was there 50 years. There was a plaque on the wall. And he would tell me stories about Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe coming in. all the legends of the day. And it was really the place that people felt safe. That's another thing about hotels. I can tell you stories, but I won't because if I go to your home, I don't

open your medicine chest. If you come to the hotel, I don't tell stories of what happens in a hotel. And there's a lot of things that happen in the hotel. So we have to keep secrets. I actually asked a friend of mine not too long ago about something that happened in your hotel, and they wouldn't tell me. And we're like best friends. Nope, can't tell you. I think the slogan, Hapton's Vegas, stays in Vegas, started with the New York hotels. I mean, that's the idea. I think there's no more interesting and cooler career than being a hotel concierge, that sense of intimacy. You know, you're the guide and cultural viewpoint on the city for this person who's coming from the outside in, but you're also their friend and you're also their intimate.

And it's a very interesting position. What did you do at the plaza, Anthony? I started as a night manager, and then I became the director of front office operations in charge of the Belmont, dorming. concierge and front desk. And it was the greatest job I've ever had. I was 26 years old right out of the military. And the time I was there, I was there two years. Home Alone 2 was shot there. I was on the set. I was responsible for getting the floor ready for McCauley Cohn's slide. I met Michael Jackson Byber Streisand. Stevie Wonder, because I left a restaurant open for him, he literally played me a song in the oak room, Brian LaRota, his manager said,

Stevie wants to talk to you. So I go into the restaurant after we kept it open from, after he had his steak, I walk him to the piano. He says, sit down. And he plays me a song called Mr. and Mrs. Little One. And he plays me my own little concert, three songs. And as I turned around, it's like 12 o'clock at night, I turn around, and there's a whole bunch of people in the lobby,

and people on the street looking in the window, and the next day it's in the paper. And here I am. So within two years, I've met all the a list of celebrities. Stevie Wonder's playing me a concert. And Home Alone, too, is filming in my hotel. So if you're a hotelier, I don't know if there's a better job on Earth. I'll be back with more from Anthony Melchiori after this short break.

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And this month on not just the Tudors from History Hit, I'm dusting down my magnifying glass to investigate some of history's most notorious murders and brutal crimes. Was it a quarrel or was the brilliant playwright Christopher Marlow actually murdered in that Depford inn? Was Amy Dudley, wife of Elizabeth I first favourite Robert, pushed down a flight of stairs to her death? Were the Geese, that great French family, actually bloodthirsty murderers, who secured their power through ruthlessness and violence? And what's the truth about the Hungarian noblewoman who allegedly killed hundreds of young women?

Join me, but not on an empty stomach, but not just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So the Plaza was really the Fifth Avenue Hotel. You mentioned all those old mansions, the Vanderbilt and so forth. Pretty much if you walk up and down Fifth Avenue today, you see the vestiges of that lifestyle. The Plaza was meant to reflect that New York Guilded Age Society experience. The design of that thing, it's huge.

I mean, how do you even manage to keep a place like that running? First of all, you have to listen to the walls. You have to listen to the history. And you have to say to yourself, what does this hotel want to be? Once you really find the authentic hotel, because a lot of times these historic hotels are taken over by people that want to make it something different. When you have a hotel that you can basically have the greatest wedding, the greatest dinner, and the greatest conversation, why would you want to make it something else? So that's number one. Number two is you have to have systems and great people. And in the hotel business, like a lot of businesses, if you're not serious and if you're not passionate about it, it will break you because you're

24-7. I was working 18 hours a day, six days a week, and I loved it. I always say I've had a lot of challenging days in the hotel business. I never had a bad day. So if you're not fully involved and you're not, as I call it, if you're not fully clicked in, it will chew you up and spit you out because if somebody wants a baked potato at 12 o'clock at night and room service doesn't have it, you run down to Mickey Mantles in your tuxedo and you run it to the suite of the owner's wife and say, here's your baked potato. Oh, she called me Tony. Tony, that was quick. He said, no problem. Whatever you need to do, there was a princess that I was literally feeding grapes stew and they list celebrities' wife who was having a little bit of a challenge and had to sit and talk to

for four hours. So if you're not fully engaged, if you're looking at the clock, you can't run a hotel. You made a reference to a phenomenon in the hotel business, which is just a regular occurrence. Hotel businesses being bought, switched over, consolidated, and so forth. This is a huge part of the industry in New York City. The plaza has gone through all kinds of ownership. We all read about them in the papers. How do they maintain the identity or do they? That seems to be, especially in the plaza's experience, a hugely detrimental aspect of things. Well, the good news is you have employees that have been there 30, 40, 50 years and they know the stories and they know the history and they keep it going and then their children come on and their children

keep it going. And if you don't understand that you work for their employees and that you're there just to support them and to make sure that the pride stays in the building, you'll get popped out. So I truly believe the heart of any great hotel in New York City are the employees. 100%. So if you ever want to keep a secret, make sure you don't throw anything away in a garbage veil of a hotel, okay, because the housekeepers know all your secrets. The idea of competition, these hotels one-upping each other, that's the essence of what made the Waldorf Astoria. Two hotels in one, the hyphen is no coincidence. The earliest version of the Waldorf Astorah, named for the town in Germany, which the Astor family, the famous New York

society family originates from. Back in the 19th century, important thing to realize, the Germans were where it was at. You know, we hadn't gotten to the French or cool. Back in the 19th century, Germany was the exotic place, and there were tons of German immigrants coming to the United States who sort of made this happen. So William Waldorf Astor has his father's mansion on 33rd and 5th Avenue. He doesn't want to live there. He decides to develop a hotel on this spot. There's not a lot of these hotels at that time, especially up there in what is the 30s today. And so he builds this hotel, which really pisses off his aunt, Caroline, who lives, you know, on the next plot of Fifth Avenue 34th Street. And so here's this business coming up. And this is like tacky. In the Gilded Age thing,

you didn't do such things as build these mega hotels and stuff. And it's certainly below the Astor thing at that point. But he develops this hotel and it's very successful. So the other part of the family becomes very jealous and his cousin develops another one next to that. So these two hotels, one called the Waldorf Hotel, one called the Astoria Hotel, are right there next to each other, and some guy from Philadelphia, Mr. Bolt comes along and connects them and it becomes the Waldorf Astoria. Yeah, and that connection was called Peacock Alley. Yes. That eventually becomes a restaurant in the now Waldorf Astoria on Fifth Avenue. Exactly. But this is only the first iteration of this hotel. It goes along and it is incredibly successful business venture. They kind of invent the big time banquet

stuff that's happening. This is a larger scale structure than any other hotel that has existed. Prior to that, pretty much life was down there on 14th Street. This is the new New York as it moves up and you're going to get all the mansions being built along the way up Fifth Avenue. It's kind of the way New York happens, as I said. But this is on another scale altogether. And until they start to get the idea of Empire State Building being planted there, that's where the Waldorf Astoria exists. Everything is about real estate, as I say. And so at some point, they're going to put the Empire State building on that spot. Waldorf Astoria has already gotten interested in moving uptown. The Grand Central Terminal is really the big deal in the early 20s and so forth. Before that,

they're going to build this big new train station that's going to service all the big suburbs of the future and so forth, and they dig up what will become Park Avenue, the train shed that you now go into and you're going into Grand Central from my land up here in Westchester County. I talk about this like I know anything about it. It is so complicated. The vision that is behind cities like New York, but New York's high bar on this, is just astonishing, the ability to see the future and how this will all develop. You can look at pretty much any pocket of New York and find that kind of story, but certainly at Central Park and what was called Terminal City. And Terminal City runs from 42nd Street all the way up to 50th,

and one of the big bookends of that street is the Waldorf Astoria, the new one, which was opened later on. You said something really interesting that I hear very few people say. The urban planning and the legality and all the challenges of developing what they've developed at that early stage is incredible. The Empire Estate Building was important because all the challenges, all of the businesses were coming into New York City, but they needed a place to house all of these businesses.

And then the Waldorf needed a place for all these businesses to have meetings and for all these businesses to have events. So it's just really interesting how one thing happens and another thing happens. And it seems like it's this great plan for 100 years, but it really happens out of necessity. And if you look at New York City and you look at the hotels and these great structures, a lot of it was just at a necessity. But I find the Waldorf Astoria moving across town to its location for the Empire State building to be built is one of the great histories of New York City.

And not very many people know that. The Waldorf is really, by that time, a very big success story already. But they are going to put their major stamp on the hotel industry with this new building. When it's built up, it's the largest hotel in the world, 47 stories high. To this day, you look at it, and it's an astonishing. structure. It's massive, a full city block. It's built in this art deco style. It's a really astonishing facade. But that was the whole point because they were becoming more about a business hotel, not a businessman's hotel, I don't want to confuse the term. And really being a government

center as much as anything else. This was where the serious meetings were meant to happen. You said a businessman's hotel. And it really was. Hotels did market to women travelers until the 30s and 40s. And it was actually at the Algonquin that they had the first marketing program to women travelers. So really when it first started, they were really marketing to the businessman.

Also, the Waldorf Astoria was one of the first hotels to have telephones, one of the first hotels to have electricity, one of the first hotels that actually deliver room service to your room. Because when people stay at the Waldorf, especially back in the day, these people, as I say, bought it, sold it, invented it.

When they go to a hotel, they want that same feeling where they live to transcend and come to the hotel. They need that same feeling because a lot of these people, they had housekeepers, they had butlers in their own mansions, their own homes. So they wanted that transition to the hotel. And like you said before, hotels at the turn of the century weren't seen as glamorous and glitz. So they had to break out of that reputation of those roadside motels. So it wasn't all of a sudden hotels were being built in New York City and it was glamorous. This was vision from people that say this will become glamorous. This will become profitable.

I remember back at the O'Gonquin, when the internet came in, the owner said, hey, we're going to charge for internet service. I said, no, we're not because back in the day, we gave pens. So we're going to give what the writers use today. And that's internet service. So we're now charging for that. We were the first hotel not to charge for internet service. Again, staying true to the history of the hotel, the Waldorf Astoria. To have a wedding at the World Off Astoria, you didn't have to say anything else.

And even if you didn't like the person that you got the invitation from, you're going. When did the president start staying there? I think it was Hoover was the first one. And then every president since Hoover stayed at the Waldorf Astoria because they had an underground train, as you probably know. Franklin and Delano Roosevelt used to use it to come. up. They also had a garage that was very safe and secure. So up until recently, the last, I think, eight years, the president stayed there. But when it was bought by a company out of China, the President of the United States stopped staying there. So up until it was sold to a foreign

country from Hoover all the way to present day, President stayed there. Obama was the first president to go to a different hotel. Interesting. Because of the Chinese ownership. Because of the Chinese ownership. You know, obviously you need to make sure it's 100% secure and you have to make sure that you feel that the president's safe. I know the hotel that the president now stays at, but I can't really tell you because then I have to shoot you. You know so many secrets. The Waldorf is opening again in the next year or two and they put a billion dollars into the renovation. And what I'm hearing, it may be sold back to the American company. Yeah, it has been indicative of the importance of a hotel

because when you've been walking around that area, we're talking about 50th Street and Park Avenue, but really it's also over to Lexington. It's been a vacuum there. As they have scaffolded that whole place off, it's just like deadened the entire neighborhood. That's how important the Waldorf Astoria is. And it's interesting because as I travel around the country around the world,

you have these small towns that the hotel is really the cement of the small towns. And you see it because you see the hotel, and you see the small town, you're like, okay, that's the heartbeat of the town. Up until you just said that, I didn't realize that the Waldorf really is the heartbeat of that small town. And as you know, New York is built into a thousand small little towns. Say you're a person that really doesn't have much going for and you want to open up a business and you're trying to influence investors.

You can go for a hundred dollar lunch, have some nice drinks, be in something that's bigger than you and impress people. You can go for just a drink, not be able to afford a room there maybe, and have a now $18 drink and feel like you belong. There are people that belong, in air quotes, that have the money to do whatever they want in that hotel. And then there are people that just want to go in and feel special for a day. I fell in love when I was 16 and walked in the plaza because I really felt that I was special. I felt that I was someone. I literally felt a detachment from the world.

When I work in a hotel, I don't know the outside world exists. And that's what the fantasy of hotels do, whether it be a turn of the century, whether it be small hotels and big hotels. It's a fantasy. Yeah. It's what happens to any hotel anywhere in the world, but especially in New York. You end up feeling like you're in an oasis in the middle of this madness that is this dense urban environment. But boy, you are dead on about the personality and the connection with people because nothing matters to me more than that person behind the desk connecting with me. making me feel like I'm a special person in their world. It is the key point in hotel business.

All kinds of other things could go wrong. But if that's not there, then I'm not coming back. And right now, we're challenged with finding those people that understand that and not succumbing to just putting somebody behind the desk. And so we're going through a renaissance in our industry currently, and I'm kind of in the middle of it. I was at a place upstate at a mansion for my podcast and the bartender said to my partner, what would you like to drink? And he said, anything but gin. And she said, oh, thank you for the challenge. And she went back and she made him a gin drink that he loved. That's the human connection you're talking about. It's give me something I'm not expecting. When you go to these legendary hotels, you're expecting a really high

standard. But when we get you is when you didn't expect that. You know, know, it all changed in about 50 years. So where do you think it's all going 50 years from now in New York? I really believe that the opulent hotels will be there. I believe the level of service will be there. However, in the last 15 years, we went from 72,000 hotel rooms to 145,000 hotel rooms. After the pandemic, we lost about 17,000 hotel rooms. But a lot of those hotels are limited service hotels. because one of the things that people found is you can do a limited service hotel and make a lot more money because there's not food and beverage involved, banquets involved. So these big hotels we speak of don't flow a lot of money to the bottom line.

They're opulent and they're beautiful and people want to have them because for their ego, whether it be a company or a private owner. But New York City in the last 15 years really been limited service hotels. However, we just had another very decadent hotel opened up called the Amman. and those are $4,000 a night rooms. So you're still seeing these beautiful, fancy hotels. So that's not going to go away because there's only one in New York. You've traveled all over the world.

I've traveled all over the world. I've never been to any city greater than New York. Not because I'm from here. Just because New York City could hold the biggest wedding at the Waldorf, the biggest meeting at the plaza, a delegation at the UN, have a big Broadway opening and have the World Series, and we absorb it. And these hotels are a big part of absorbing those events.

Without these grand hotels, the city doesn't function. Anthony Melchiori, this is a rare public chance. Say, what a fan I am of yours and have been not only as a colleague, but really a guy watching you do what you do. But you're not only entertaining to watch, you're also lifting the industry standard of the people you serve and the people who hire you up. You've taken being hotel concierge to the nth degree.

So that's really cool. Well, I said when someone asked me at a event in California a couple years ago, what would you do if you weren't running hotels or if you weren't on TV? I'd say I'd be a concierge. And they said, why? I said, because if you wanted a pink elephant with three legs and a tutu dancing in a lobby in 45 minutes, I'm the guy that's going to make it happen. Where can people find you these days?

Anthony Mulcuri.com is my website. My podcast is no vacancy that we do three days a week live, all about hotels. We have everyone from front office people to, the leaders of brands from Hilton Marriott. We have Hort Shultzni, who will help create the Rich Carlton. And if you're a young person wanting to know about hotels, it's the greatest college you can go to. Thank you, Anthony Malkiori for joining us on American History Hit.

Your passion and fondness for great hotels is unmatched. Your uncompromising standards for perfection, for service, or lifting the industry. Thank you. They're lucky to have you. And I'm lucky to have you as a friend. Thanks for joining me on American History Hit. We'll see you in the lobby. you drink, a $23 martini.

Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.