64 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
All That” with her arrival in New York
for the internship. Greene returned to
the Barbizon in 1957 to write a series
of articles for the Post—not about the
hotel per se, but about the kinds of
women who lived there. She desig-
nated some of them “lone women”
who checked in and never checked
out, forsaking husbands for work or
enduring hotel life because, as she tells
it, they never found a way to get to
the suburbs. “Our town,” the series
teased, “is full of them. They come—
looking for careers, romance, adven-
ture, an escape from boredom. What
happens to them once they get here?
What of their high hopes for spec-
tacular success, their dreams of mar-
riage to a handsome prince charm-
ing? Can they overcome the universal
fears of metropolitan bachelor girls—
fear of failure, fear of spinsterhood,
fear of sexual assault?”
Greene’s exposé drew attention to
what the Barbizon and plenty of other
social institutions of the era had tried
to keep hidden: the depression and the
despair experienced by so many mid-
century women who were striving for
careers while facing systematic dis-
crimination, and pursuing sexual in-
dependence while being judged by the
mores of earlier generations. In addi-
tion to secret abortions and covered-up
suicides, there were women who could
never afford their own apartment, and
families who lived in residential ho-
tels because they had nowhere else to
go. Despite its reputation, the Barbi-
zon had never housed only ingénues.
The future diplomat and reproduc-
tive-rights advocate Robin Chandler
Duke lived at the hotel as a teen-ager,
sharing a tiny room with her mother
and sister when her father could no
longer support them. One of the ear-
liest residents was the activist and ac-
tress Molly Brown, who famously sur-
vived the sinking of the Titanic but
found herself financially strapped after
her estranged husband, a millionaire,
died intestate.
A
lmost all the women in Bren’s
book are white, a reflection of the
demographics of the Barbizon’s clien-
tele. “The Upper East Side was New
York’s whitest of white enclaves,” Bren
writes, before telling the story of the
woman she suspects to have been the
first Black guest at the hotel. In 1956,
Barbara Chase-Riboud, a student at
Temple University, won one of the
Mademoiselle guest editorships. Al-
ready a distinguished artist with work
in the collection of the Museum of
Modern Art, she would go on to pub-
lish a best-selling novel about Sally
Hemings. But, during her internship,
Chase-Riboud was asked to leave the
room whenever clients who opposed
integration came to the Madison Av-
enue office for meetings. She was not
allowed to participate in the summer
fashion show and was never invited to
use the swimming pool in the base-
ment of the Barbizon. She did, how-
ever, appear in Mademoiselle, photo-
graphed with her fellow-Millies for
the annual college issue, which also
included an article about the activist
Autherine Lucy’s desegregation of the
University of Alabama.
The civil-rights movement took
place mostly outside the walls of the
Barbizon—although Bren suggests
that the fight for equality may have
had something to do with the hotel’s
demise. In 1963, the same year that
Plath published “The Bell Jar,” Betty
Friedan published “The Feminine
Mystique,” offering the sort of women
who stayed at the Barbizon a way of
seeing themselves in the feminist move-
ment. And in 1970, when Gloria Stei-
nem and Eleanor Holmes Norton ledmarchers down Fifth Avenue, they
were calling for an end to gender dis-
crimination of all kinds, technically
including same-sex housing like that
offered by the Barbizon. After New
York City began making sex a pro-
tected category in its anti-discrimina-
tion laws, the hotel petitioned the
Commission on Human Rights for an
exemption—as did the New York Mets,
which wanted permission to keep hold-
ing Ladies Day eight games a year.That petition soon became irrele-
vant. Real-estate trends were making
residential hotels like the Barbizon ob-
solete. Shared bathrooms and com-
mon kitchens were out; luxury co-ops
and condos were in. A consultant tasked
with reviving the Barbizon by reno-
vating the space and attracting new
residents discovered that more than a
hundred of the women living in the
hotel were protected by rent control
or rent stabilization. He disparaged
them as lonely hearts like those Greene
had written about decades before,
claiming that they loitered in the lobby
in curlers and slippers, heckled younger
guests, and opposed integrating the
hotel with male guests. In reality, of
course, management was just eager to
replace them with higher-paying cli-
entele. But the Women, as they were
called, understandably did not agree
with that characterization and did not
want to move, and they found an ef-
fective leader for their resistance in the
Crown Publishing editor Alice Sachs,
who, during her more than forty years
at the hotel, took on Tammany Hall
and served as Manhattan Democratic
Commissioner. Sachs and the other
women were paying a fourth of the
average rent for the area, and they
banded together to retain a tenant-
rights lawyer.
In the end, their rents were pro-
tected, but not their way of life. The
Barbizon opened to men on Valentine’s
Day in 1981, with a promotional lot-
tery to determine which bachelor would
become the first man to spend the night
at the hotel and which married couple
would be the first to share a room. Al-
lowing men upstairs resulted in scan-
dals, but of a different sort than the
founders had feared: in a tabloid tri-
fecta, the Republican lobbyist Craig J.
Spence was arrested at the Barbizon,
after police, responding to a distress
call he made when a male prostitute
allegedly threatened him with a gun,
found cocaine and a crack pipe in his
room. A few months later, the wife of
the first President Bush’s Secretary of
Commerce was mugged at gunpoint
outside her Barbizon room.
By this point, the Barbizon had shuf-
fled through a series of owners: bought
by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in 1983
and renamed the Golden Tulip Barbi-