Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [64]
At the Waldorf, I interviewed James Blauvelt, the hotel’s executive director of catering—and unofficial historian. When he’s not overseeing banquets in the Grand Ballroom, where Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera hold fundraisers with ticket prices beginning at a thousand dollars and tables costing a million, Blauvelt manages the hotel’s archives. He is well suited to both tasks. Punctilious, erudite, and jovial, his words are well enunciated, and he speaks in complete paragraphs. He looks like the kind of guy who goes to a lot of cocktail parties—and kills at every one. Blauvelt’s father was a globe-trotting pharmaceutical executive, so he practically grew up in hotels. He studied hotel management in college and has been working at the Waldorf for nearly thirty years. He became the hotel’s unofficial historian by accident. About twenty years ago, he found the archives in cardboard boxes, abandoned in a storage area. Blauvelt couldn’t help but organize them, and soon he found himself the de facto go-to guy for questions about the Waldorf’s history.
Blauvelt gave me the abridged version of that history. The hotel was the result of a feud between two Astor cousins, William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV, who had built competing hotels next to each other on Fifth Avenue in the 1890s. Eventually the two hotels merged, though the feud apparently continued. The cousins couldn’t agree on whose name should go first in the merged hotel’s name, so, as Blauvelt emphasized, officially it is spelled with an equal sign, not a hyphen: Waldorf=Astoria.
In 1929 the original Waldorf was demolished to make way for the Empire State Building. Legend has it that the financing for the new Waldorf was secured the day before the stock market crashed. However, as Blauvelt explained, the Depression had a silver lining. “It turned out that labor was so inexpensive and abundant that they were able to lavish great detail and quality into the construction of the building.” There was no rush to finish the building either, since business wasn’t expected to be brisk anyway.
When it finally opened on October 1, 1931, the Waldorf was the largest and most luxurious hotel in the United States, if not the world. Each of its two thousand rooms had a private bathroom. It had twenty-four-hour room service, and a pneumatic-tube system for delivering messages to rooms. It even had its own radio station. President Hoover, a future tenant, spoke at the grand opening. “The erection of this great structure,” he said, “has been a contribution to the maintenance of employment, and an exhibition of courage and confidence to the whole nation.”
As expected, however, business was bad, and the Waldorf barely survived the Depression.
If the Trumans were to come back today, Blauvelt told me, they would have no trouble recognizing the place. Not that it hasn’t changed a lot since 1953. Major “renovations” in the 1960s and ‘70s that obscured the building’s grandeur have been reversed. “It was decided that the building was something of a treasure trove—one of the largest art deco structures in the United States, filled with that detail in its furniture and fixtures, as well as its architectural design. And also a lot of important beaux art elements. So restoration began in 1982 and continues to this day. There’s been over four hundred million dollars spent on this constant restoration of the original. So when you look at old photographs of the hotel, it looks remarkably similar to the way it does now.”
I asked Blauvelt if the arrangement whereby the Trumans were allowed to stay at the hotel for free was unusual. Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, he patiently explained to me the facts of hotel life. “The publicity that their visit would bring would be important to the hotel as a marketing strategy.” But