It was a good slogan, Naftali says a litt

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Israeli billionaire Isaac Tshuva and his C.E.O. Miki Naftali acapulco hotels s plan to put condominiums in the Plaza hotel hit a New York nerve. How dare they mess with the magical home of the Oak Bar, the Palm Court, and Eloise? Ultimately, the developers 181 apartments were snapped up, sight unseen, for record acapulco hotels prices but their troubles acapulco hotels were just beginning. The author investigates the bitter accusations and lawsuits acapulco hotels that are turning a fantasy into a nightmare.
I n New Yorkers imagination, the Plaza is so hopelessly enchanting that even Eloise s bawth that flooded the entire hotel on the night of the Venetian Masked Ball could turn into something fabulous a night in Venice itself, riding around in gondolas. Four years ago, the hotel, at the southeast corner of Central Park, was purchased by the Israeli company El-Ad Properties, owned by billionaire Isaac Tshuva, which turned as much of the building into condominiums as it was allowed to by the city. Some of the world s wealthiest people, including a good number acapulco hotels of New Yorkers, lined up to buy, sight unseen, their magical slices of New York history. Today, the Plaza is far from the glamorous urban fantasy depicted in Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight s Eloise books. It s a place that s plagued by lawsuits, a place where fiberglass moldings and other standard materials are passed off as true opulence, a place where one resident got stuck overnight in a garbage room, with no one to hear her cries.
While El-Ad has improved the Plaza in a few ways for which it hasn t gotten credit, the improvements have been drowned out by the complaints about small windows, low ceilings, obstructed views, buckling floors, trashed carpets, glacially slow elevators, and frequent interruptions acapulco hotels of running water. Though the downsized hotel portion that was allowed to remain had its opening in March, it s still a work in progress, says El-Ad. Indeed, as of mid-November, toilets hadn t been delivered to the fifth floor. In the new retail section, which occupies 39,000 square feet of the lower level, only half the stores had opened, forcing such shops as the handbag designer MCM and the cell-phone maker Vertu to try to attract business not only in the middle of a market crash but also amid hammering and scaffolding. The celebrated Palm Court, where Eloise went for tea, is hemorrhaging $125,000 a month.
One rival hotelier says, It s a shame a beautiful landmark has been messed acapulco hotels with like this and taken away from New Yorkers and even visitors. If it were the Essex House or the InterContinental, no one would care but this is the Plaza.
S ince its opening, in 1907, the hotel, designed by Henry Hardenbergh, has been one of the few places in the city where the ordinary citizen could come in off the street and step into a glittering, sophisticated playground. Its history is filled with the most glamorous characters of the 20th century: Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marlene Dietrich, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marilyn Monroe, acapulco hotels Liz Taylor, Jacqueline Onassis, the Beatles, and, especially, Eloise the mischievous little six-year-old who has represented the Plaza s soul more than any actual human being; you might say she created its soul. Forty movies have been filmed in the Plaza, including Neil Simon s Barefoot in the Park and Alfred Hitchcock s North by Northwest (Cary Grant was kidnapped from the Oak Bar). Fitzgerald set a scene of The Great Gatsby there. Truman Capote acapulco hotels threw his Black and White Ball perhaps the most famous party in American acapulco hotels history in the Grand Ballroom. But it was also a place where a grandmother from Yonkers could take her granddaughter for tea in the Palm Court, where a couple of hansom-cab drivers acapulco hotels could come in for a beer at the Oak Bar after a day of driving tourists through Central Park. When New York had a rigid caste system, the Plaza cut across religion and class. Its ballroom acapulco hotels has been the venue for thousands of debutantes, Bar Mitzvah boys, and brides and grooms. The Plaza belonged to everybody.
But Tshuva, who made his fortune from an Israeli oil-and-gas company called Delek before branching acapulco hotels internationally into residential real estate, and his C.E.O., Miki Naftali, did not buy the Plaza due to any emotional or romantic attachments. Rather, El-Ad had just come off the disappointment of losing its bid on another acapulco hotels Manhattan hotel, the Mayflower, which would be turned acapulco hotels into the iconic new condominium 15 Central Park West. I was walking around and looking what else can I buy, recalls Naftali, 45, a slight, extremely excitable man, sitting at a conference table at El-Ad s New York headquarters, beside publicist Lloyd Kaplan, whose P.R. firm specializes acapulco hotels in problem solving and crisis management. Just by coincidence, I was walking next to the Plaza, and I said, What about the Plaza? He soon discovered that it was co-owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, of Saudi Arabia, and Mr. Kwek Leng Beng, of Singapore, and that it wasn t for sale. Given the choice between trying to cajole an Arab prince and a guy he d never heard of from Singapore, the Israeli went for the latter. His voice rising and falling for dramatic effect, Naftali acapulco hotels takes you through every twist and turn along the way to the deal s being signed acapulco hotels which included an immovable antagonist (Mr. Kwek), a formidable challenger (Vornado s Steve Roth, who was ready to offer $725 million, but didn t move fast enough), an irritated wife back home (Mrs. Naftali), and lots of sprinting through airports. But several months after setting his sights on it, Naftali emerged with his prize, for $675 million. He would put in another $400 million to refurbish and convert it.
As it happened, this foreign developer, acapulco hotels hoping to cash in on the condominium-conversion craze, had almost acapulco hotels unwittingly landed a sacred cow. El-Ad s cluelessness might have been summed up at the 100th-anniversary party for the Plaza, held in Grand Army Plaza, just outside the hotel. Tshuva enlisted his favorite singer, Paul Anka, to perform. Onstage with Tshuva, before a crowd of 1,200, Anka sang a version of My Way, the song he wrote for Frank Sinatra, its lyrics retooled for the occasion: No portraits, please, of Eloise, only Miki Naftali.
The first thing Naftali underestimated was the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, the scrappy but powerful acapulco hotels hotel workers union, led by Peter Ward, a handsome 50-year-old working-class hero from central casting, who was married in the ballroom of the Plaza (or as he pronounces it, Plaazer ). To this day, the union claims that El-Ad s original scheme was to get rid of all food-service venues the Oak Room, the ballroom, and the Palm Court and to convert the entire building to condominiums. Naftali s first step, says a union spokesperson, was to try to fire the Plaza s 900 hotel workers. In line with the union s collective-bargaining agreement, El-Ad offered the workers severance of one week s pay for every year that an employee had been with the hotel. Ward pointed out to Naftali that many of the workers acapulco hotels had been there for 30 or 40 years, and pushed for the more traditional two weeks pay for each year. Naftali refused. acapulco hotels At which point an indignant Ward helped launch a $2 million Save the Plaza campaign, which lasted acapulco hotels throughout the spring of 2005.
It was a born winner. Celebrities like Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Liza Minnelli acapulco hotels got on board. Soon hundreds of room attendants, doormen, and bellhops were marching down Sixth Avenue. At Radio City Music Hall, before a crowd of over 6,000 members of the union, Mayor Michael Bloomberg swore he d do everything he could to help Plaza employees keep their jobs. Everyone from director Peter Bogdanovich to Jesse Jackson made speeches outside the Plaza extolling its sacredness. The Post, the Daily News, and The New York Times covered each and every move of the heart-tugging New York drama. Eloise acapulco hotels was pictured acapulco hotels in one paper as living out on the street; Skipperdee, her beloved turtle, had died. The Landmarks Preservation Commission was enlisted to declare that not only was the fa ade a landmark (as had been the case since 1969) but so were eight public spaces, including the Oak Room, the Palm Court, and the Grand Ballroom. The union even sent a couple of Plaza employees, including a doorman, Neil Johnson, to Israel to help sway public opinion about Tshuva, who commanded great respect in his native country because he was entirely self-made and lived modestly. As Johnson acapulco hotels recalls, reporters asked him, Why shouldn t Mr. Tshuva be able to do whatever he wants? [I said], acapulco hotels How would you like it if Donald Trump came over, purchased the King David Hotel, and wanted to turn it into a department store with a bunch of Zabar s and McDonald s? Would you appreciate that? By the end of his trip, Johnson claims, we ended up winning over the people of Israel.
According to the union, when El-Ad saw that it was losing the public-relations battle, Naftali came back to Ward and said he d be willing to relent on the severance issue and cough up double. By this point, it was not enough. Thanks to Save the Plaza, the union now had the upper hand. After three months, with the involvement of Bloomberg, El-Ad agreed to make drastic changes to its plans. It agreed to limit the number of residences to 150. Around 350 hotel rooms would remain. (The number of hotel rooms was subsequently decreased to 282 and the residences acapulco hotels increased to 181.) Three hundred fifty jobs were saved. The union savored what felt like a huge victory. As one member puts it, Here was this Israeli billionaire swaggering into town hoping to make more billions. He was beat out by a bunch of room attendants and doormen.
It was a good slogan, Naftali says a litt