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Home > What's New > Rooftop Smoking: Gramercy Park Hotel
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Rooftop Smoking: Gramercy Park Hotel
A Luxury Retreat in New York City
Posted: Friday, August 31, 2007
By Gregory Mottola
The roof-top gardens have a beautiful view of the city and are smoking
friendly.
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Picture everything you've read or seen about the mythic Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Recall the Byzantine weaving of nature and architecture with enough majesty to be classified as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Now think less Mesopotamia and more Manhattan and imagine a lush rooftop garden floating 16 stories over Gramercy Park (New York City's last private park) where you can enjoy a cigar without incurring a fine.
Unlike the Hanging Gardens, this is a place you can actually visit. You need only walk south down Lexington Avenue until it ends at the iron bars of the verboten Gramercy Park. Look to your right and you will see the understated facade of the Gramercy Park Hotel, but before you make a dash for the elevators, there are a few things you should know. First, the terrace gardens are private, reserved for members and hotel guests only. Second, the lobby and lounges on the cavernous first floor are worth checking out, even though you can't smoke in any of those spaces.
The gorgeous lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel is replete with original
art and a hand-carved fireplace from Italy.
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Despite its cutting-edge, new high bohemian ambitions, the hotel has some history. Humphrey Bogart married his first wife there in the 1920s, and Babe Ruth was known to frequent the bar during the Great Depression. Over the course of the twentieth century, the hotel acquired a reputation as a hideaway for both glitterati and literati types. Ownership changed many times until the hotel was bought by hotelier Ian Schrager, who gutted the interior with the idea of creating a luxury establishment that still paid homage to its bohemian roots. Not that Bogie or the Babe would recognize the place anymore should their ghosts decide to haunt this landmark.
If a museum decided to drop off all of its closeted and forgotten exhibits at an abandoned castle inhabited by squatting artists, you'd get something like the ground floor of the new Gramercy Park Hotel.
"It's over for design hotels with their slick, spiffy and over-styled interiors," said Schrager. "They have been embraced by the mainstream and become the rule, not the exception. The Gramercy Park Hotel is the ultimate anti-brand and anti-design hotel. It is a celebration of the idiosyncratic."
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