Fancy, but not my kind of fancy.
Written: Jun 03 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: They gave me a huge discount when I was displaced after the WTC attacks.
Cons: Unfortunately, they treated me like a poor country cousin for it.
The Bottom Line: Fancy, but not my kind of fancy.
|
|
|
| kboo's Full Review: The Waldorf=Astoria? |
The Waldorf=Astoria is a Park Avenue icon, a legend. I remember being swept up in the fantasy as an 8-year old child, when I read a Reader’s Digest account of a serviceman who proposed to his wife on the roof of the Waldorf during World War II. He was not a New Yorker, he had no money, and he wrote a letter to the Waldorf in advance of his visit, asking the orchestra to play the couple’s special song as he proposed. Needless to say, the W=A did everything he asked, and more, to make that night the most romantic and special evening he’d ever had. At that point, I decided that someday, I too, would stay at the W=A, and that it would be the most romantic experience of my life. If the W=A were a cruise ship, it would be the QEII. If the W=A were a movie star, it’d be Katharine Hepburn, aging gracefully.
Fast forward about 25 years. I now live in New York and work a few blocks from the W=A. Although I pass it often, I generally have no reason or excuse to stay there. Every once in a while I think about spending a weekend there, but with rooms starting at $350 a night, I find many other uses for the money. (Starting! and I’ve seen how small NY hotel rooms can be - I’d be staying in the maid’s room at the “starting” price.) Then 9/11 happened, and I had no place to stay. My friend Matt had enough space and a pull-out couch, but he wasn’t allowed to have pets at his apartment. We still had no information about when our building would reopen, and I couldn’t stay indefinitely, so I started calling area hotels. All I needed was a space where two people and a dog could live for at least a week. Neighbors of mine were staying at the Tribeca Grand, which was charging a special “relief rate” of $300 a night. Flights were still grounded, so the hotels were surprisingly full of stranded tourists. Corporations rented entire floors of hotels in Times Square to set up temporary office space. The best rate I could find was the Doubletree Suites, which was charging $189 a night (“disaster relief rate”) and would allow my dog. It didn’t even occur to me to call any of the higher-end hotels, and I started looking for furnished apartment rentals (as did about 6,000 other displaced residents.)
I had also asked my firm and its travel agency to help, but didn’t hold out much hope. In the past, I had always found much, much lower rates on my own. This time, however, they came through for me. I could get a room at the W=A for a special rate of $115 a night, or (and I think this is when I started crying) I could get a suite for $121 a night. Needless to say, I splurged the $6 and got the suite.
All told, I stayed about 2 weeks at the W=A at the end of September. By the end, I was glad to leave and thankful that I had a place to stay, but I was also disappointed because the reality of the W=A fell far short of the fantasy.
ROOMS
Base-rate rooms are small, no question about it. My suite, on the other hand, was the largest hotel room I had ever seen. It was the stuff of movies, all red velvet and gold. I was in a corner suite with a view of the Chrysler building, and it was pin-drop quiet. I had a foyer (!!) with a marble topped table and gilt mirror. To the left, I walked through a closet/dressing area into the bedroom with its attached bath. The bath, typical of older pre-war buildings, was small, though it had rose marble throughout and plenty of Neutrogena supplies. The bedroom was large by New York standards, but small by other standards - large enough for a chair and ottoman, the king bed and end tables, the TV armoire, and one of those wooden valet/stand things they only sell at the Sharper Image and in airline in-flight magazines, where men can hang their suits and put their spare change. (Sadly, all I had was one change of clothes, pajamas, and a backpack full of dog food.) The bed was simply amazing - covered in red and gold velvet and brocaded pillows of all shapes and sizes, with a real headboard rather than one of these cheesy headboards-glued-to-the-wall prevalent in most hotels. The heavy brocaded drapes and damask upholstery on the chair matched the bed furnishings. There were enough mirrors and fleurs-de-lis to make Louis XIV feel at home.
The living room was similarly outrageously over the top. In addition to a second TV armoire and mini-bar, I had a large worktable with a fax machine, a separate round dining table near a window, and a large seating area with a pull-out sofa, two armchairs, and endtables, coffee tables, and sofa tables galore. I also had a fireplace! It didn’t work, but there was a decorative display with glowing glass “coals” that I could turn on with a wall switch. The furniture was arranged to be conducive to large gatherings, as the living room seating area was at one far end of the room, and the office and dining area at the other end. In the center was the fireplace and TV, and enough floor space (the carpet was a similarly blinding and garish pattern of red, maroon and gold) to make Boo run around doing donuts in the middle of the floor. The suite was larger than most New York apartments and Boo knew it.
THE BEST STUFF ABOUT THE W=A
The scale and glamour of my room was surpassed only by the beauty of the public spaces. The W=A occupies an entire city block between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue, at 49th and 50th Streets. The main entrance off of Park Avenue is decidedly Art Deco, with international flags flying over the entranceway. After walking up a short flight of marble steps, you are in a triple-height lounge area adorned with cream-colored marble columns and flower arrangements ten feet high. Several overstuffed couches and chairs form intimate seating areas in the grand space, the centerpiece of which is an intricate floor mosaic that must be seen to be believed. Additional mosaics adorn the ceiling. Whether one stays here or not, a walk through the W=A lobby is worth a visit. In the afternoons and evenings, live piano music, played on Cole Porter’s piano from a special ‘gazebo’ on the mezzanine, welcomes you back to the hotel.
After passing through the light and airy mosaic-floored lobby, the front desk area occupies another large, triple-height room in the center of the building. Where the Park Avenue lobby was light and airy, the check in area is large but cozy, with rich wood paneling, dark wood columns, and thick, dark gray/navy carpet. There is an ornate clock that ticks the quarter hours in the center of the room, and more brocaded sofas and chairs and tables with large china bowls full of candy - a child’s delight.
THE WORST STUFF ABOUT THE W=A
SNOOTY, SNOOTY, SNOOTY! With the exception of the front doormen and the desk clerk who checked me in, all of the other hotel staff gave me the nasties. I don’t know if they knew I was a “charity” case but they sure made me feel like it. This even though the only business the hotel had was related to the disaster - I saw firemen from Beverly Hills and Arizona, going daily to and from the site to work, and Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that lost 2/3 of its employees in Tower One, was using several ballrooms for its offices and for the grieving families. Despite the overall atmosphere of grief and sadness, the fact that the hotel staff had the energy and the inclination to be snobby to someone who was homeless as a result of 9/11 resulted in BIG minus points for the Waldorf=Astoria. Various hotel security personnel took it upon themselves to stop me and tell me that dogs were not allowed (they are, and I had obtained clearance before checking in). I also had a security guard come to my room late one night accusing me of “harboring a noisy child” in my room; where that accusation came from, I have no idea, particularly since at that point I had been staying at the hotel for nearly a week.
Even when the staff was not being overtly condescending or nasty to me, they provided mediocre service. A room service waiter seemed miffed that I did not add any tip to a bill that already had an 18% tip and a $5 service charge. Housekeeping service was spotty – when I have stayed at other hotels with my dog, I generally make it a practice to phone housekeeping before taking Boo for a walk so that the room can be serviced while we are out. I’ve stayed at many other hotels (notably, the Four Seasons in DC, the Westin in Boston, the Inn at Lake Joseph in New York, and Kedron Valley Inn in Woodstock, Vermont, where I didn’t even need to call the staff to let them know I was going out). At the Waldorf, I would stay out for an hour or more, and I would go out at the same time every morning, yet every single morning, the room would not have been serviced.
Compared to the cold, snotty service, I suppose I shouldn’t have taken umbrage at the $25 hamburger (which was very good but not worth $25) and the $15 jar of pistachios from the minibar that I ate for dinner in a fit of stubbornness around midnight the night after the $25 hamburger. (I was tired, and there were no reasonably priced alternatives for a quick, late dinner nearby.) That’ll show them to charge $25 for a hamburger, I thought to myself as I ate pistachios that probably cost 50 cents each. I also felt that there was something morally wrong with charging $6 to launder a pair of underwear that had cost me all of $6 per 3-pack at Costco, and so I took to washing my limited clothes in the sink and hanging them on the mildewy clothesline in the tub.
Living essentially alone as I was for those weeks after 9/11 (my husband was kept on high alert at the Air Force base nearby), I found the slightly shabby, long hallways lonely, disconcerting, a little creepy, and eerily reminiscent of the hallways of the hotel in The Shining. In all my time, I never saw another guest in my hallway or my section of the hotel (the hotel is shaped like two capital “H’s” joined together) although I occasionally say people in the elevator or in the public spaces. My traumatized dog cringed at the frequent sirens, as did I. When I left the W=A in the fall of 2001, I remembered it as a place of grief and loneliness, not as a beautiful, luxurious hotel as I’d imagined.
UPDATE:
I have since attended a function at the Waldorf and can report that the catering services are excellent and the public ballrooms are beautiful, certainly better kept than the rooms upstairs. Separate large capacity elevators with lovely metal Art Deco doors whisk guests among the ballrooms and function rooms, and the ballrooms themselves are rich with marble, gilt, crystal, and mirrors.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
kboo
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 130
Trusted by: 283 members
About Me:
De-fezzed in two topics. Ask me if I care. Hey, what happened to my picture?
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.