Lorna's Reviews > The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel

The Plaza: The Secret Life of America's Most Famous Hotel was a delightful look at the Plaza Hotel in New York City from the opening of its first location in 1890 to the luxurious hotel it became when it reopened its doors in 1907 at Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. This is not only a well-researched history and biography of the famed Plaza Hotel and many of its famous residents as well as its investors over the years, but a remarkable history of New York City and America from the Gilded Age, the Jazz Age and Prohibition, through two World Wars, the bringing down of the World Trade Center and through 2018. If you love history, New York City, architecture, this is the perfect book.

"Great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service." -- Joan Didion

"America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,"Fitzgerald wrote of this period. "The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn east and north toward them--we were at last admittedly the most powerful nation and there was gala in the air."