omgomgomg

hotel de love

I signed off for my beach week, but the house has Wi-Fi and I can't be quiet for (over)long spells.

Here (on The North Fork with my family) everyday is like dreaded Sunday, where the Times is passed around section by section and no one will listen to me (or--that's inaccurate--they break from listening to me).

Wednesday's has a "Dining" section (but you knew that), which is nice I guess but...

I've addressed my NY Times problems here before, griped its booming cultural deafness and that. It's like how I started to try to talk to everyone (out here) about my problems with The (present day) South Fork (full of Jill Zarin and Chase Crawford), but realized they'd have to get on my OH MY G_D MANHATTAN (AND PORTIONS OF BROOKLYN WHERE I DON'T LIVE) IS SUCH GARBAGE NOW bandwagon in order to get on my OH MY G_D THE HAMPTONS IS A TRASH BIN bandwagon. It's like that because Times fluff reportage and 'Hamptons Living' are equally certain that New York is especially sofizzticated in exclusion of everybody else, a graceless, elbowing money(and publicity)-brained (Neo-Puritanical?) sofizztication (that is obviously a BATHROOM HAM PARTY [in Pillow parlance]). And my family is a New York one (who reads The Times daily, mostly for the serious bits [non-'Styles'-styled sections]), and I feel guilty for looking askance at whole regions and populations of the place where I was born and now live (but did not grow up...). It can't be helped.

The thing is

on the front of "Dining" there's an article about beer gardens (again), which is mostly about the beer garden at The Standard Hotel (in two lifelike, color reproductions) and then a smattering of BK and L.E.S. visions/versions that run on twee empty—citizen's taste for demi-authenticities, materials run by/through "like-minded folk" (for us by us/slimy, misplaced snobbery for blocks and blocks). I've known about the set-up at The Standard for a cold minute, found it irritating from a remove; but someway, it turned my stomach extra this week.

A few years back (two-ish), when "when will the high line open?!" buzz was peaking, I was totally enchanted by The (near-complete) Standard, which I assumed was a residence. It's damn good-looking in an East German typa' way (and because of that Block-ness and its stilts, made all the more lovely by proximity to the Highway—imagine!). I was feeling Soviet-looks (always have). And I love new buildings in New York; I'm ever-ready to get excited about them (and poo-poo those gnarly, staid architecture critics). However, finding the building was the next in Andre Balasz's line of products (one [Chateau] appropriated, the rest [Mercer, Sunset, Standards] invented) got me icy.

I de-love hotels. Of course I do. I de-hate most (all?) of a generation (90s to now?) of New York hotels, the Boutiques, intended as hipper-than. Hipper-than the old hotels, the great old hotels. In these last decades, in Manhattan, the Boutiques have served to prove (to me, to me) just how combustible the pairing of hipness and luxury is. Time-based industries, like fay-shun, like music, like (um...?) art, can bear, can benefit from, this combustion, can at least re-group, re-coup (and eventually benefit). A hotel, a whole, heavy, slow, solid building, a still-point, an Institution, should be treated as such, should not be conceived on/for a 5-year plan (and a 5-year plan alone).

Luxury is a bulwark. It does shift; Hipness, politics, the Industrial Revolution, the concept of "concepts" have all made our luxuries different from those enjoyed by...17th century Dutch merchants of our same neighborhood. But much (most) is the same between us and them, then and now. Luxury is a matter of fineness (whether hand-worked or brain-worked) and rarity, splendor, comfort, safety and self-aggrandizement (hope for La Futura) in things (furs, gems, impeccable service). How wonderful.

Hipness must move. It is defined by its own rapid pace. It is best "contained" by people; it utterly wrecks places, any standing thing that attempts to capture and hold it. Hipness can be recorded, but those records are subject to phases of unHipness, the pronouncements of the moving, breathing (thankless) Hip.

Hipness cannot build an Institution (to do so is ultimately unHip). People who are Hip, who strive to be Hip, must either rove forever, or, settle down and give up Hipness (Hipness may [likely will] once again return to their doorstep, but then it will, must leave for elsewhere). In settling down, one establishes an earnest set of habits, a personal taste—not Hip taste, the taste that is "to be feared and revered," but personal taste, take it or leave it.

In conceiving a hotel, a house, a post-Youth uniform (an Institution), one honestly (not simply, but honestly) puts forth what one finds beautiful, smart, exciting, appealing, comfortable, memorable, special, good—what one LOVES for life, for afterlife (a legacy of LOVE, permanent affirmations drawn up from History, from Holy places).

****

Ian Schrager is the first stand-out hotelier-developer of "The Boutiques Period" in New York (the boss).

(Of course,) Before hotels, he partnered with Steve Rubell to open Studio 54 in 1977.

Studio was a "perfect nightclub," because it was a progenitor of mucho with a music to match, but mostly because:

it (or its Schrager and Rubell attributed first-era) died at the age of four.

Then (we'll skip Palladium), hotels, The Morgans....everything after—

a style of decorating (luxury) that was heavy, thick, lined...but lacking much detail, stuff

"Sexy" quips like unfrosted glass showers

Fusion foods

Nightclubs everywhere, Nightclubs (and their publicists) that inevitably ran aground before five years were out

When Shrager up and left The Morgans Group in 2005 (whatta lynch-pin year) to start The Ian Shrager Company (and ultimately team with Marriot to brand a Shrager hotel chain), he set upon refurbishing (gutting) The Gramercy Park Hotel with Julian Schnabel as skipper. Oh boy.

This was The Boutique colonizing exactly the sort of great, old (fuddy-duddy) hotel it was borned in opposition to.

I stayed at The Gramercy for a weekend with friends in high school. It was shabby round about. The two lobby bars, one Deco, one 'teens Baroque, were incredible. Handsome, preserved old spaces that weren't treated with the kiddest gloves; they were there to be wandered into, to spend an afternoon anonymous, happy, making one's own way in the funny Old/New...(humid, but I mean it). The guests were mostly budget-conscious Euros. The rooms were musty and dusty pink. Breakfast was served in a sunny, stained "conference room." You could obtain one of several keys to the Park on big fobs from the front desk, which took the traditional dark wood mailboxes and key-compartments as its backdrop. I recall thinking the joint could use a refurbishment, a restoration (but not a bulldozing and [ooof] rebranding).

Two years later I did a friend a favor by showing up to an "event" he was "promoting" at the Sky Bar up top of it. The place was downright seedy. The bar only served screwdrivers. I (mostly my mens) got into an altercation with a young lawyer who had the wrong idea about me. We had to take the service elevator up and down (the other was broke), some 25 sardines. It was fun.

Then it was shuttered.

Then, reopened.

And nothing was recognizable. I had guessed at it in the shuttering phase, but come to see it, I was shocked (and heart-sick) about those lobby bars. They were dunz. They were smoke. There had been no auction, and no attempt to preserve those wallpapers (the best parts). The New Gramercy Park Hotel (and its...slick?...neighboring residences) was like any number of places anywhere else. And that would have been fine (I guess) if it hadn't necessitated the clumsy snuffing of a singular place, a real place (where many far more important scenes than the silly ones I've spun were set)—an Institution.

I've been a little kind in posing just this Hipness+Luxury=Potentially Dangerous Combustion idea. Because, about these hotels (and the stuff of Times fluff), there is nothing I (I) deem Hip. The places are absorbed in efforts toward Hipness, sorting the structures (anarchies) of Hipness. And their effort (try-hard-ing), in-the-money-ness, their Hollywooder pandering make them utterly square (loserly) from inception.

Regardless, as written, the focus on Hip, holding and containing it, makes all goals short-term. There is no Hip long-term. There is only realness (realness!) long-term, an Institution, a still point (a Home!).

****

I had a blissed out afternoon in Midtown with PMC last spring. We started by playing hooky for lunch at The Four Seasons (restaurant, not hotel), an Institution among Institutions (so handsome! and a Dover sole). We (not as an end [the end was cops in Central Park] but as a middle) also had drinks at The Beekman Tower Hotel, on the roof with the U.N. and the Pepsi sign and that (second best to the Verrazano Narrows) 59th St. Bridge. Perhaps, we were flashing Hip (...we were). But none of the places we paused were, which is part of why we were....if Hip must needs move, the Hippest is the Hip that can go secret, soft, lite. The Hip that is a sylph, that is not being mined and drawn out/on and fawned-over by its hosts...

****

Someone told me about how in the 70s and 80s, during The Armory weekend, a few artists (and their representatives) would set up sexy, gypsy booths at a slight distance from the Big Tent, in rooms at The Gramercy Park Hotel, paintings on beds, doors ajar. Just so.

They were visiting, passing Hip, checking in and out.