Plaza Hotel: A $3 Million Cash Deal, Depression Widows and Eloise

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When the Plaza Hotel opened on October 1, 1907, about 90 percent of its occupants lived there full time. It replaced an earlier Plaza built between 1883 and 1890 and plagued by financial troubles and shoddy work. In 1902 a syndicate led by builder Harry S. Black and financier Bernhard Beinecke paid $3 million in cash for the site at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, then the largest all-cash deal in Manhattan real estate. Architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh designed an 18-story French Renaissance chateau that took 27 months and $12.5 million to build, with a sub-basement plant making 15 tons of ice a day, a coal plant and a switchboard of Tennessee marble. Short-term guests paid $2.50 a night and shared the cost of 500 bathrooms and a round-the-clock staff with the wealthy residents, who had a private entrance on 58th Street.

The 1929 crash broke the founders. Black died by suicide in 1930, Beinecke died two years later, and by 1932 half the residential suites were empty; the Grill Room became storage and the Rose Room an automobile showroom. Wealthy widows with inherited trust money stayed on and kept the hotel solvent, and that world of long-term residents later inspired Kay Thompson's Eloise books. Conrad Hilton bought the Plaza in 1943, and in 1988 Donald Trump bought it for $407 million in a leveraged buyout. After a prepackaged bankruptcy he surrendered 49 percent to lenders, and in 1995 he sold it at a loss to a group including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Elad Properties bought it in 2005 and cut it to 282 hotel rooms and 181 private condominiums.

• Diamond Jim Brady and Mark Twain were early regulars, and the hotel opened during the Panic of 1907.
• Frank Lloyd Wright kept a second-floor suite for five years in the 1950s while designing the Guggenheim Museum.
• F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived and wrote there, and the Beatles stayed during their first US trip in 1964.
• Ivana Trump led a gilded renovation, and the basement Trader Vic's restaurant was shut down.
• Only about a third of today's condo owners live there, with the rest using their units as pied-à-terres.