Waldorf Astoria: An Astor Feud, Track 61 and a Dead Sea Scrolls Sale

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The Waldorf Astoria began as two rival hotels on Fifth Avenue, where the Empire State Building now stands. In the 1890s William Waldorf Astor, feuding with his aunt, built the 13-story Waldorf beside her mansion, and her son John Jacob Astor IV answered with the taller Astoria next door. The hotels were joined by Peacock Alley, the 300-foot corridor that gave the name its hyphen; the hyphen was dropped in 2009. After the site was sold for the Empire State Building, a new 47-story Art Deco hotel rose on Park Avenue over New York Central tracks, using purchased air rights, 27,100 tons of steel, 11 million bricks and columns set on lead and asbestos pads to damp train vibration. It opened on October 1, 1931, with a radio address by President Herbert Hoover, but drew only 500 guests for more than 2,200 rooms.

Hotel president Lucius Boomer chose to sell prestige and privacy rather than cut back. An internal carriageway and the private Track 61 platform let leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt arrive unseen. The hotel hosted the 1947 meeting that produced the Waldorf Statement and the Hollywood blacklist, the 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace with Dmitri Shostakovich as protesters ringed the block, and the 1954 basement purchase of four Dead Sea Scrolls by Yigael Yadin. IBM introduced its first personal computer there in 1981. Hilton sold the hotel to Anbang Insurance Group in 2014 for $1.95 billion, then a record hotel sale, and it closed in 2017 for conversion to condominiums with about 375 hotel rooms, while 62,000 square feet of interiors gained landmark protection.

• Society columns told readers to meet at the hyphen, which later became a double hyphen resembling an equal sign.
• Guy Lombardo's New Year's Eve broadcasts from the ballroom helped make Auld Lang Syne the midnight song.
• The Who were banned for life in 1968 after a destructive party, then forgiven in 1990 when their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction was held there.
• Herbert Hoover lived in the Waldorf Towers for decades, and Cole Porter kept two pianos in his apartment.
• Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller and Victor Borge entertained in rooms such as the Wedgwood Room and the Starlight Roof.