Great, Grand & Famous Hotels

Great, Grand & Famous Hotels

Author: Fritz Gubler

Publisher: Great, Grand & Famous Hotels

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 0980466709

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This is a book for lovers of remarkable hotels. Whether you are a long-term luxury hotel addict, or just fantasising about a visit to one of the world's great hotels, this book is for you. This book features stories about great, grand and famous hotels sourced from history, legend and the occasional snippet of gossip. Take a peek inside and discover a treasure trove of famous or forgotten anecdotes. See the dramas unfold in lobbies, dining rooms, bars and ballrooms, or behind the closed doors of guest rooms and Presidential Suites. Marvel at those who made these hotels what they are: daring financiers, visionary owners, inventive architects, cutting-edge designers, devoted hoteliers and renowned chefs. Remember the great, grand and famous celebrity guests and meet the new breed of visionaries who are creating the great hotels of the future. Visit historic hotels, including The Ritz, Paris; the Waldorf-Astoria, New York; the Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles; the Savoy, London; the Hassler, Rome; The Peninsula, Hong Kong; Raffles, Singapore; Mena House, Cairo; Taj Lake Palace, Udaipur; Chateau Lake Louise, Alberta; the Cipriani, Danieli and Gritti Palace, Venice; Reid's Palace, Madeira; and the Baur au Lac, Zurich, alongside modern masterpieces such as The Burj al Arab, Icehotel and other futuristic hotels. The book is intended to give the traveller a better understanding of, and greater insight into, the hotels they admire and love. It is also a reference book for the passionate hotel professional and provides knowledge for young hoteliers, helping them to understand the history and the development of their industry. Combining four years of research, assisted by many students in various hotel schools around the world, and with contributions by six travel writers, it is hoped this book will entice more people to seek out the world's great, grand and famous hotels, and to stay in them for an unforgettable experience, not just as a place to spend the night.


Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age

Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age

Author: Marianne Lamonaca

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 2005-10-27

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 156898555X

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The Breakers, the Waldorf, the Biltmore, the Sherry, the Pierrethese landmark hotels are synonymous with grand luxury and style. When they were built, in the 1920s, their refined elegance and grandeur set the bar for hotels and resorts the world over. Responsible for creating these and countless other hotels throughout the United States, were the partners of a single architectural firm: Schultze & Weaver. Together, this duoan architect and an engineervirtually invented the glamorous lifestyle made famous in films like Grand Hotel. Catering to the social elite of which they were themselves a part, Schultze & Weaver synthesized the Old World style of Renaissance Italy, Moorish Spain, and Georgian England with all of the modern amenities that made hotel living luxurious. This book presents portfolios of fifteen of the firms most spectacular hotels, culminating in the Art Moderne masterpiece of the Waldorf-Astoria. Over two hundred period photographs and hand-colored architectural renderings chart the ascent of the American hotel in all its glory and glamour, before the Great Depression forever changed the lifestyles of America's rich and famous. Essays address the cultural and technological developments that underpin the creation of resort and residential hotels, including the elemental role played by Schultze & Weaver. This book is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami, held in celebration of their tenth anniversary.


Chicago's Grand Hotels

Chicago's Grand Hotels

Author: Robert V. Allegrini

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2005-11-09

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1439616590

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Architecturally imposing, historically rich, and socially important, Chicagos magnificent grand hotels have fascinated generations of Chicagoans and have pleased generations of guests. The Palmer House Hilton, The Drake, and The Hilton Chicago have come to represent a collective formal living room for Chicago, where the citys most important visitors are accommodated, entertained, and made aware of the grandeur and sophistication of their hosts hometown. They were built to inspire aweand still do for anyone fortunate enough to find themselves in the lobby of The Palmer House Hilton, The Palm Court of The Drake, or the Grand Ballroom of The Hilton Chicago. Many of the most famous locales in these classic structures have been transformed or have disappeared altogether due to changing times. Gone, for example, is The Hilton Chicagos famous rooftop miniature golf course and Boulevard Room supper club, complete with its ice shows. Gone, too, is The Drakes legendary supper club, the Camellia House. While the Empire Room of The Palmer House Hilton continues to exist as an function room, it no longer reverberates with the sound of Liberaces piano or Jimmy Durantes vocals, as it did when it was the citys premier entertainment facility. Chicagos Grand Hotels chronicles over 100 years of Chicago hotel history through vivid photographs and memorabilia from the archives of The Palmer House Hilton, The Drake, and The Hilton Chicago. It tells the compelling story of the visionary architects and hoteliers who brought these hotels to life and made them structural testaments to the warmth of midwestern hospitality.


Waldorf Hysteria

Waldorf Hysteria

Author: Fritz Gubler

Publisher: Great, Grand & Famous Hotels

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 61

ISBN-13: 0980466717

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Waldorf Hysteria presents the lighter side of hotels. This appealing gift book looks back to the first golden age of hospitality, with full page photographs from the archives, hotel etiquette advice from long ago, and quirky tales of hotel shenanigans. The book includes plenty of tales from today's hotels so readers can judge for themselves. These stories cover all aspects of hotel life: room service; pets in hotels; celebrities and scandals; rip-offs and scams; unusual hotels; hotels as movie sets; hotels of future; and the things people leave behind.


The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains

The Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains

Author: Bryant Franklin Tolles

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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This carefully researched, profusely illustrated volume identifies and explores some thirty outstanding resort complexes, explaining their architectural details, their social histories, and the often surprising stories behind their lovely wooden facades.


British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire

Author: Sam Goodman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-06-05

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 131767894X

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The position of spy fiction is largely synonymous in popular culture with ideas of patriotism and national security, with the spy himself indicative of the defence of British interests and the preservation of British power around the globe. This book reveals a more complicated side to these assumptions than typically perceived, arguing that the representation of space and power within spy fiction is more complex than commonly assumed. Instead of the British spy tirelessly maintaining the integrity of Empire, this volume illustrates how spy fiction contains disunities and disjunctions in its representation of space, and the relationship between the individual and the state in an era of declining British power. Focusing primarily on the work of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John le Carre, the volume brings a fresh methodological approach to the study of spy fiction and Cold War culture. It presents close textual analysis within a framework of spatial and sovereign theory as a means of examining the cultural impact of decolonization and the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War. Adopting a thematic approach to the analysis of space in spy fiction, the text explores the reciprocal process by which contextual history intersects with literature throughout the period in question, arguing that spy fiction is responsible for reflecting, strengthening and, in some cases, precipitating cultural anxieties over decolonization and the end of Empire. This study promises to be a welcome addition to the developing field of spy fiction criticism and popular culture studies. Both engaging and original in its approach, it will be important reading for students and academics engaged in the study of Cold War culture, popular literature, and the changing state of British identity over the course of the latter twentieth century.


The Escape Industry

The Escape Industry

Author: Mark Tungate

Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers

Published: 2017-10-03

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0749473517

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Travel as a concept is universally attractive and the opportunities for fun, engaging branding and marketing in this sector are arguably limitless. Glamour and appeal aside, travel is a hugely competitive, multi-million pound industry and marketers of all sectors can learn important lessons from it. Catering for mass consumer travel, from business travel and adventure travel, to specialist and niche interests, the providers of escape have been impacted as much by technology as they have by the changing habits and desires of travellers themselves. The Escape Industry presents an expert view of travel marketing and branding, focusing particularly on how travel has been utterly transformed for both consumers and providers since the beginning of the 21st century. Mark Tungate focuses on some of the travel industry's most famous brands and shares how all marketers can learn from the industry's rich experience of digital transition. Tungate traces the evolution of this fascinating industry, from nineteenth century trailblazers such as Thomas Cook and The Ritz, to today's innovations such as TripAdvisor, Couchsurfing and Airbnb, and explores the branding secrets that have enabled them to survive. A lively read full of incidents, anecdotes, unexpected encounters and a ground-breaking report from the final frontier and space tourism, The Escape Industry is at the cutting edge of this attractive sector, examining some of the biggest names in the industry. It will take travel and tourism students, as well as marketing and branding practitioners, on a journey to the heart of a rapidly changing business.


Hotel Mavens

Hotel Mavens

Author: Stanley Turkel CMHS

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1496933346

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The word maven is defined by Wikipedia as a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. Since the 1980s it has become more common when the New York Times columnist William Safire adapted it to describe himself as the language maven. The word from Hebrew is mainly confined to American English and was included in the Oxford English Dictionary second edition (1989). My three hotel mavens are: 1) Lucius M. Boomer, one of the most famous hoteliers of his time, was chairman of the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria Corporation. In a career of over half a century, he directed such celebrated hotels as the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia, the Taft in New Haven, the Lenox in Boston, and the McAlpin, Claridge, Sherry-Netherland and the original as well as the current Waldorf-Astoria in New York. 2) George C. Boldt who was the genius of the original Waldorf-Astoria. It was said of him that he made innkeeping a profession and, more than any man, was responsible for the modern American hotel. 3) Oscar of the Waldorf who was described in 1898 by the New York Sun: In only one New York hotel, however, is there a personage deserving to be called a matre dhotel. Anyone who studies him closely will soon arrive at a firm conviction that he might quite as appropriately have been called General or Admiral, if circumstances had not led him into the hotel business. Oscar knows everybody. Oscar was a superstar of his time and one of the stalwarts who managed both the original and the current Waldorf-Astoria. Among his many duties, Oscar commanded a staff of 1,000 persons bedsides conducting a school for waiters, at the time the only one of its kind in the United States. In 1896, Oscar wrote one of the greatest cookbooks of its time: The Cook Book by Oscar of the Waldorf. It contains 907 pages and 3,455 recipes.


The Plaza

The Plaza

Author: Julie Satow

Publisher: Twelve

Published: 2020-06-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781455566655

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Journalist Julie Satow's thrilling, unforgettable history of how one illustrious hotel has defined our understanding of money and glamour, from the Gilded Age to the Go-Go Eighties to today's Billionaire Row. From the moment in 1907 when New York millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt strode through the Plaza Hotel's revolving doors to become its first guest, to the afternoon in 2007 when a mysterious Russian oligarch paid a record price for the hotel's largest penthouse, the eighteen-story white marble edifice at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street has radiated wealth and luxury. For some, the hotel evokes images of F. Scott Fitzgerald frolicking in the Pulitzer Fountain, or Eloise, the impish young guest who pours water down the mail chute. But the true stories captured in THE PLAZA also include dark, hidden secrets: the cold-blooded murder perpetrated by the construction workers in charge of building the hotel, how Donald J. Trump came to be the only owner to ever bankrupt the Plaza, and the tale of the disgraced Indian tycoon who ran the hotel from a maximum-security prison cell, 7,000 miles away in Delhi. In this definitive history, award-winning journalist Julie Satow not only pulls back the curtain on Truman Capote's Black and White Ball and The Beatles' first stateside visit-she also follows the money trail. THE PLAZA reveals how a handful of rich, dowager widows were the financial lifeline that saved the hotel during the Great Depression, and how, today, foreign money and anonymous shell companies have transformed iconic guest rooms into condominiums that shield ill-gotten gains-hollowing out parts of the hotel as well as the city around it. THE PLAZA is the account of one vaunted New York City address that has become synonymous with wealth and scandal, opportunity and tragedy. With glamour on the surface and strife behind the scenes, it is the story of how one hotel became a mirror reflecting New York's place at the center of the country's cultural narrative for over a century.