62 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
BOOKS
ROOMS OF THEIR OWN
A history of New York’s most famous hotel for women.
BY CASEY CEP
O
n the corner of East Sixty-third
Street and Lexington Avenue,
in a building where the apartments
sell for anywhere from one million
to thirteen million dollars, there is a
woman who pays around a hundred
and thirteen dollars a month in rent.
She lives on the fourth floor, and has
maid service two days a week, a front-
desk staff to take her messages, and
a private bricked terrace at the end of
her hall.
That woman is one of a handful
who have lived in this twenty-three-
story building for decades, through
renovations and condominium con-
versions; as the World Trade Center
rose and fell and was rebuilt; as mini-
skirts gave way to bell-bottoms and
then to skinny jeans; as newspapers
went on strike and transit workers went
on strike and teachers went on strike;
as civil-rights marchers and gay-rights
protesters took to the streets; as crime
waves gave way to market booms. These
women checked into the Barbizon
Hotel and—even though it technically
no longer exists—they never left.
New York City once had more than
a hundred residential hotels, places like
the Algonquin, where Dorothy Parker
and James Thurber held court by day
and laid their heads at night; and the
Carlyle, where President Kennedy kept
an apartment; and the Plaza, whose
most famous resident was fictional, the
six-year-old Eloise, who lived in her
“pink, pink, pink” room. Most of these
hotels were curiosities of long-since-
reformed real-estate regulations, ex-
empt from building-height restrictions
and from fire-safety regulations, so long
as they did not have kitchens in their
guest rooms. Some of them opened in
the late nineteenth century, though
most were built around the time of the
First World War; few had the cultural
cachet of the Barbizon. The subject of
films and of novels, the Barbizon was
also a mainstay of the society pages.
Actresses like Grace Kelly, Liza Min-
nelli, Phylicia Rashad, and Cybill Shep-
herd took their beauty sleep there,
walking the same halls as writers like
Sylvia Plath and Peggy Noonan and
riding the same elevators as the future
First Lady Nancy Reagan.
The historian Paulina Bren, in her
new book, “The Barbizon: The Hotel
That Set Women Free” (Simon &
Schuster), chronicles the experiences
of these women, and of some of the
hundreds of thousands of others like
them, who stayed in the hotel. More
than a biography of a building, the
book is an absorbing history of labor
and women’s rights in one of the coun-
try’s largest cities, and also of the
places that those women left behind
to chase their dreams. In Bren’s tell-
ing, some of the same forces that
brought them to Manhattan led to
the end of the Barbizon as they knew
it—and to the New York City that
we know today.
T
he Barbizon was not Manhattan’s
first hotel exclusively for women—
that was Alexander T. Stewart’s Hotel
for Working Women, on Fourth Av-
enue, which opened in 1878 and closed
within a year. But the Barbizon was
larger, more fashionable, and more
successful. The seven hundred or so
women staying there on any given
night had access to a swimming pool,
a gymnasium, a library, lecture halls,
soundproof music rooms, a rooftop
garden, and first-floor businesses in-
cluding a hairdresser, a dry cleaner, a
pharmacy, and hosiery and millinery
shops. There was a free afternoon tea
for guests. Male visitors were barred
from the residential floors.
The hotel’s Upper East Side cor-
ner lot, previously the site of Temple
Rodeph Sholom, had cost its devel-
opers nearly a million dollars, and
they spent another four million on SARA KRULWICH / THE NEW YORK TIMES /REDUX
For decades, the Barbizon was one of the city’s most coveted addresses.
