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The St. Regis New York

New York City, New York, United States · St. Regis · Grand Luxury

The St. Regis New York: ExteriorThe St. Regis New York: ExteriorThe St. Regis New York: The St. Regis New York — Hotel Review | Condé Nast Traveler

John Jacob Astor IV opened the Beaux-Arts St. Regis on 4 September 1904 as New York's tallest hotel, a $5.5 million Trowbridge & Livingston tower at Fifth and 55th. The King Cole Bar later served Fernand Petiot's Bloody Mary as the Red Snapper in 1934 beneath Maxfield Parrish's Old King Cole mural. Salvador Dalí kept rooms for years; Qatar Investment Authority bought the landmark in 2019.

About The St. Regis New York

History

The St. Regis New York was born from the imagination of John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest man aboard the Titanic, who spent his fortune building what he intended to be the most perfect hotel in the world. Astor purchased the land at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street in 1898 and commissioned architect Trowbridge and Livingston to design an eighteen-story Beaux Arts palace that would stand as the tallest hotel in New York when it opened in 1904. The construction cost $5.5 million — an almost incomprehensible sum for the era — and the result justified the extravagance. The St. Regis introduced central air conditioning to New York hotels, installed its own electrical plant, and offered butler service to every guest, an Edwardian refinement that became the foundation of the brand's global identity.

Astor died in the Titanic disaster in 1912, but the hotel he built survived and flourished in ways that have made it one of the most consequential addresses in American cultural life. The King Cole Bar, which opened in the building's basement in 1906 and moved to its current location in 1932, became famous for the Maxfield Parrish mural that still covers its north wall — a painting commissioned by Astor depicting Old King Cole that Parrish originally created for the Knickerbocker Hotel before it found its permanent home at the St. Regis. In 1934 the bar's head bartender, Fernand Petiot, brought his recipe for the Bloody Mary from Paris's Harry's New York Bar and served it at the King Cole under the temporary name "The Red Snapper" at the request of hotel management, who considered "Bloody Mary" too vulgar for the room. The cocktail's American debut at the King Cole Bar is one of the most enduring origin stories in the history of American drinking.

Beneath the soaring coffered ceilings of the Astor Court, guests have been taking afternoon tea for more than a century, served beneath a Waterford crystal chandelier in a salon whose trompe-l'oeil ceiling remains among the finest decorative paintings in any American hotel. The hotel has been the address of choice for monarchs, presidents, and cultural figures across every decade of its existence: Marlene Dietrich maintained a suite here in the 1930s and 1940s; Salvador Dalí kept a residence for twenty years, sometimes accompanied by his ocelot; Marilyn Monroe, Noël Coward, and John Lennon were all guests at various points in the twentieth century.

The building underwent a major restoration in 1991 under new ownership that returned its gold and marble interiors to something approaching Astor's original vision. The Iridium jazz club, which operated in the hotel during the 1990s, added another chapter to its cultural biography. A subsequent restoration preserved the silk wall coverings, the twelve-foot ceilings, and the butler pantries on each floor that allow the Astor butler tradition — unbroken for more than a century — to continue functioning exactly as Astor imagined it.

Today the St. Regis New York holds Forbes Five-Star and AAA Five Diamond designations, standing on the same gilded block of Fifth Avenue where Cartier, Harry Winston, and the original Tiffany showroom once defined American luxury. The Bloody Mary is still shaken at the King Cole Bar. The Parrish mural still watches over the room. The butler still appears when the bedside button is pressed. Astor's vision, more than a century old and undiminished, continues to set the standard for what American luxury hospitality can be.

The setting

The St. Regis New York stands at 2 East 55th Street on the block where John Jacob Astor IV built his Beaux-Arts tower in 1904, at the time a provocation to the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller mansions flanking Fifth Avenue. The New York Times declared it the finest hotel in America upon its opening, a judgment the address has sustained ever since. Rockefeller Center and the Museum of Modern Art are each five minutes on foot, Central Park six minutes north, and the jewelers of Fifth Avenue — Cartier, Harry Winston — steps away, situating The St. Regis at the perpetual epicenter of New York's luxury geography.

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