THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 65
zon Hotel, it was then sold to a group
that included the owners of the Stu-
dio 54 night club, who went into fore-
closure in 1994. One of them managed
to buy back the hotel with another
group of investors in 1998, only to even-
tually sell it to the Berwind Property
Group, which renamed it the Melrose
Hotel at the Barbizon before announc-
ing that it would be converted into con-
dominiums. The earliest buyers at Bar-
bizon/63 included the grandson of the
Bulgari jewelry founder, the former
C.E.O. of the Meow Mix cat-food
company, and the comedian Ricky Ger-
vais. Condos were listed for as much
as fifteen million dollars, but the Bar-
bizon women moved back into their
renovated S.R.O.s for the same rents
that they had been paying before.
B
ren argues that what first attracted
women to the hotel is what ulti-
mately shut it down: freedom. In the
twenties, women had limited options
for work, and few places to live out-
side the family home. But, with each
passing decade, as more careers and
more housing opportunities opened
up to them, fewer and fewer wanted
to live in same-sex hotels.
A residential hotel in New York of-
fers a rich longitudinal history of class
and of sexual politics, and by and large
Bren does her subject justice. “The
Barbizon” is full of fantastic detail, from
Grace Kelly scandalizing other guests
by dancing topless in the hallway to
the litany of men who claimed to have
sneaked past the front desk. But, apart
from one stray remark, Bren ignores
whatever countercultural narratives
might have been recovered from the
shadows and silences of the hotel’s in-
stitutional history. That remark comes
from the owner of Malachy’s, a nearby
bar, who, in his recollections of the
neighborhood, mentioned rumors of
“dykes, queers, fruits, and pansies.” Bren
says nothing else about same-sex at-
traction among any of the hundreds
of thousands of women who stayed
there over the decades. It’s a surpris-
ing lacuna in the work of a scholar
who seems to have mined every news-
paper report, memoir, living resident,
and private archive of anyone who ever
stayed at the hotel.
Perhaps because they left the most
extensive records of their experiences,
or perhaps because she herself is a
writer, Bren focusses too much on the
famous authors who called the Bar-
bizon home. After writing about both
Plath and Didion in the chapter on
Mademoiselle, the book devotes a
stand-alone chapter to each of them,
repeating material and revisiting the
same narrow demographic. That’s a
shame, because some of the most fas-
cinating characters in the book are the
least well known. One of Plath’s fel-
low-editors, for instance, was Neva
Nelson, who watched a nuclear-bomb
test with her geology class in Death
Valley the summer before her intern-
ship, an experience that left her with
facial scars that lasted seven years. She
later got thyroid cancer, which she
blamed on a radioactive fish that she
had swallowed that day, on a dare. The
summer Nelson worked at Mademoi-
selle, she began dating a wealthy New
Yorker who wanted her to stay in the
city, but whose family helped her set-
tle her bill at the Barbizon so that she
could return to the West Coast. At
the end of her trip, she realized she
was pregnant. She later delivered the
baby herself, in the bathroom of a cou-
ple who had offered to help her but
took her son away not long after he
was born. She never saw him again.
It was another tragedy associated with
the Barbizon that helped her carry on.
“Sylvia saved me,” Nelson tells Bren.
“I didn’t want to be known as the other
one who killed herself.”
For Nelson, as for most of the
women who stayed at the Barbizon,
the hotel was a way station, somewhere
to escape their past or to plan their
future. Much of history has that kind
of transience; it is full of lives and in-
stitutions too fleeting to have left much
of a trace. The delight of “The Barbi-
zon” is how it temporarily holds those
forces of oblivion at bay, as Bren lets
us into the rooms and the lives of
otherwise anonymous women. Such
glimpses are sometimes uncanny, as
when Peggy LaViolette, who first
stayed at the Barbizon during the sum-
mer of 1955, returned thirty years later,
after the hotel had integrated, to stay
there with her husband. One night,
after getting off the elevator, LaVio-
lette watched an older woman walk
down the hall and disappear through
an unmarked door, behind which she
briefly glimpsed a section of the Bar-
bizon’s outdated green paint and orig-
inal doorframes. “The old woman
glanced back again at Peggy, said noth-
ing, and then closed the door behind
her,” Bren writes. “Peggy shivered as
if she had seen a ghost.”
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