Drake Hotel (New York City)

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The main entrance to the Drake Hotel in January 2006.

The  Drake Hotel  was a hotel on  Park Avenue  and 56th Street, in Midtown Manhattan , New York City .

The hotel was built in 1926 by real estate company Bing & Bing  . The 21-story building had 495 rooms. According to one source, it has been praised for innovations such as automatic cooling and spacious, luxurious rooms and suites. Fauchon  Schokoladen was located on the first floor. 

The silent film star Lillian Gish  lived in this hotel from 1946 to 1949. Other well known guests were  Frank Sinatra , Muhammad Ali , Judy Garland , Jimi Hendrix  and Glenn Gould . The restaurateur  Toots Shor  spent his old age here. Songwriter Jerome Kern   suffered a heart attack on November 5, 1945 on the sidewalk in front of the Drake. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Drake Hotel was the preferred accommodation in New York for a number of rock bands such as  Led Zeppelin  and The Who . During her stay in July 1973, Led Zeppelin was stolen $ 203,000 in cash from a hotel safe. The money was never found and the identity of the thief or thieves was never revealed. The band later sued the hotel for the theft. British rock band Slade stayed at this hotel on October 6, 1973 after performing at the New York Academy of Music. British rock band The Sweet stayed  at the Drake during their grueling USA tours in the 1970s. Shepheard's has been hailed as the finest nightclub of its time, where people like  Lee Radziwill  and Julie Newmar  danced The Frug to a live DJ .

The hotel was  purchased by Swissotel in the early 1980s , who renamed it Swissotel The Drake  and carried out a room-by-room renovation for $ 52 million (now $ 66 million, adjusted for inflation). The work was completed in 1991. In 2006 the hotel was sold to real estate developer Harry Macklowe for $ 440 million (now $ 557 million, adjusted for inflation)  . It was demolished in 2007. In 2011, the building site was one of the most valuable in New York.

In mid-2012, construction of the 426 m high residential high-rise 432 Park Avenue began on the former property of the Drake Hotel .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stanley Turkel: Nobody Asked Me, But… No. 21 / The Drake Hotel in New York, Fair Franchising is Not an Oxymoron, By the Numbers, Another Secret Underground Shelter, Passing of Anthony G. Marshall. In: hotel-online.com. December 2006, accessed April 7, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Chris Welch: Led Zeppelin . Orion Books, London 1994, ISBN 1-85797-930-3 , pp. 68 .
  3. ↑ Drake Hotel tops most valuable NYC development sites list. Press release. In: therealdeal.com. June 21, 2011, accessed April 7, 2018 .

Coordinates: 40 ° 45 ′ 40.5 "  N , 73 ° 58 ′ 17.5"  W.