...I just ran across this neat story from an old Paul Harvey book*** my dad had... Paul Harvey was a radio personality who did a 'feature' called 'the Rest of the Story'... he set up a whole story, and at the end, he told ya who the story was about...usually pretty surprising... he actually did one about Ginger's kidnapping - check it out HERE . But, as for the Waldorf-Astoria tale, here's the transcript of it... which honestly is a bit 'anti-climactic', since I've already told you the 'subject in question', but hopefully it's still pretty cool... at least it belongs in this blog, right?
...and another note - the original Waldorf-Astoria, (aggregately) built in the 1890s, was demolished in the late 20s, to make room for the Empire State Building, completed in 1931. The current Waldorf-Astoria was also completed in 1931, which is obviously the one used in the film.
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HYPHEN HOTEL
We've heard about the Hatfields and McCoys, the Capulets and the Montagues. How is it, then, that we have overlooked one of the most vehement family feuds of all time?
Bill and his Aunt Caroline.
Aunt Caroline was the Number One society leader of her day. Bill, by comparison, was a social outcast. As the family fortune was distributed, however, nephew Bill came out on top with a whopping one hundred million dollars to his credit. Aunt Caroline? A mere fifty million.
Until the 1890s, their competition was confined to snide comments at separate gatherings. The inevitable outward conflagration was soon to result in New York City's most notorious hyphen.
Bill had more money, his Aunt Caroline had more prestige; they lived next door to one another, neighboring mansions, with a spacious garden between them.
Quite frankly, all of this galled Caroline's wealthier, less popular nephew Bill. For him, in time, next door became too close for comfort. Thus inspired, Bill came up with a delightfully fiendish plan by which his aunt would be forced either to swallow her pride or to move elsewhere.
He would tear down his own mansion and he would build a hotel. A thirteen-story hotel, right there on the site of his present home. It would be the most exclusive, luxurious hotel in the entire nation, but more important, Aunt Caroline's four-story mansion next door would forever be in its shadow!
And it came to pass. March 14, 1893, that hotel, named after Bill, was officially opened; 530 rooms, 350 private baths, 970 employees, towering in its architectural grandeur over Aunt Caroline's comparatively humble abode.
For a while it appeared as though Bill had triumphed. Within a year, Caroline had engaged an architect to design for her a new home farther north on Fifth Avenue, far from the shadow of her nephew's hotel.
What she did not say at the time was that she had plans for the mansion she was about to abandon; it was to be torn down. In its place, to be built by her son, a hotel! A hotel that would be right next door to her nephew's hotel, only with more rooms, more private baths, more employees; it was to be more luxurious, more exclusive, and above all, taller!
The suggestion worked. A second hotel was built, physically joined to the first. And as a happy footnote, the openings between the two were never sealed.
for what had begun as a feud between wealthy Bill Waldorf and his august Aunt Caroline Astor grew to become a most celebrated name in the history of hospitality, separated by a cautious hyphen: Waldorf-Astoria.
That is THE REST OF THE STORY.
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Well, hope ya dug that... pretty neat background, IMHO...
KIG, y'all!
Hu
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