--The hotel opened in 1904 for those "who were rich, and who were or wanted to be fasionable, but (who wanted a hotel) which would also be somewhat quieter and more exclusive." Each room/suite had its own personal thermostat, doorbell, telephone and Steinway piano, and the entire hotel was equipped with a centralized vacuum system.
--The St. Regis was one of the hotels--the Astoria (later combined with the Waldorf) and the Knickerbocker were two others--built by John Jacob Astor IV (the richest person to die on the Titanic).
--Television and movies featuring the St. Regis include Mad Men, Taxi Driver, The First Wives Club, The Devil Wears Prada, and Miss Congeniality.
--Famous guests include Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio (there's a legend of a screaming match between the two of them after Marilyn shot her famous skirt scene in front of thousands of spectators), John Lennon and Yoko Ono (pre-Dakota), Salvador Dali (for a decade), Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph Pulitzer, Marlene Dietrich, Scarlett Johansson, Sean Penn, Courteney Cox, and Kirk Douglas (I sat next to him in the lobby a few years ago).
--The architects, Trowbridge and Livingston, are best known for two gems downtown--the elegant Bankers Trust Company Building (the northwest corner of Wall and Broad) and the JP Morgan Building (southeast corner of Wall and Broad). They also designed the Knickerbocker Hotel in Times Square, the original Hayden Planetarium, B. Altman, the Gulf Building in Pittsburgh, and the Oregon State Capitol Building.
--The King Cole painting in the bar (now known as the King Cole Bar) was commissioned by Astor in 1906 for $5,000 and painted by Maxfield Parrish for the Knickerbocker Hotel. When that hotel was converted into an office building in the 1930's, the famous mural (8' high by 30' wide) was relocated to the bar at the St. Regis, already famous for introducing New York City to the Bloody Mary. The king's face is reputedly of Astor himself and legend has it that Parrish deliberately painted the king passing gas (he grins with curled toes) to the noticeable chagrin of his courtiers on either side. The painting was restored in 2007 and is currently valued for over $12 million.
--The lobby is one of my favorite interiors in the city. In his biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, Brendan Gill writes that Wright and his generation of Chicago architects were inspired by aesthetic experiments in Vienna and Glasgow that seemed to skip over the East Coast and head straight to the Mississippi Valley. "Scores of Secessionist borrowings are to be found in Chicago and almost none in New York City. A possible exception is the interior of the St. Regis Hotel (1901-1904), designed by Trowbridge and Livingston. Though the exterior of the building is in a neo-classical Parisian vein, one observes hints of racy, decadent Vienna in the voluptuously oleaginous bases of the marble columns in the lobby. They appear to be melting, and the effect is a pleasingly erotic one."
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