On a stifling summer afternoon in 1906, night watchman Michael Butler climbed to the eighth floor of an unfinished building at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. The structure was rising into what would become the Plaza Hotel, but its construction was already soaked in tension. Union ironworkers refused to work beside non-union men, tools went missing, and threats echoed through half-finished walls. Butler was struck from behind with a metal bolt, lifted, and hurled from the scaffolding to his death eight stories below.

The tabloids called it the midair murder. Police arrested suspects, the trial dragged on for weeks, witnesses contradicted each other, and evidence vanished. Every accused man walked free. No one was ever convicted.

Construction continued without pause. The building rising from this violence was the vision of Harry S. Black, a dealmaker who had married into the George A. Fuller construction empire and built the US Realty and Improvement Corporation into a force capable of reshaping Manhattan.

The first Plaza Hotel, an eight-story brick structure opened in 1890, had become hopelessly outdated by 1905. Black convinced his partners to demolish their own profitable hotel and build something that would make the world take notice. He hired architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, who had designed the Dakota and the original Waldorf Astoria. The budget was $12.

5 million. The design was French Renaissance, inspired by the chateaux of the Loire Valley. Italian marble filled the lobbies, French limestone covered the facades, and rare woods from four continents paneled the interiors. On October 1, 1907, exactly two years after groundbreaking, the Plaza opened its doors.

Reservations had been filled for months. Rooms started at $2. 50 per night, with the grandest suites commanding $25 or more. Alfred Gwyn Vanderbilt was among the first prominent guests, and Diamond Jim Brady arrived with enough luggage for a small expedition.

Black had understood a fundamental truth about the American wealthy: they did not simply want comfort, they wanted to be seen. The Plaza’s location at the southeast corner of Central Park meant every arrival happened in full view of Fifth Avenue, transforming check-in into public performance. The hotel was profitable within its first year, but Black himself did not survive his success. His later years were marked by depression, failed ventures, and a collapsed marriage.

In 1930, he took his own life, leaving behind the building that had made his name. Within two years of opening, the Plaza welcomed its most extraordinary resident. A woman who called herself a princess arrived in 1909 with demands that would have sent any reasonable manager running. Elizabeth Vilma Wa Parli required a fourteen-room suite, accommodations for twelve servants, and space for her personal menagerie of bears, alligators, falcons, owls, and a collection of dogs.

She had been born in Hungary in the early 1860s and had gained her title through a brief marriage to a Russian prince. What she possessed from birth was talent: she had trained as a portrait painter in European ateliers and painted Kaiser Wilhelm II, winning a gold medal at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. In New York, Andrew Carnegie and Nikola Tesla sat for her. Among her admirers was General Daniel Sickles, the Civil War figure who had lost a leg at Gettysburg and had been acquitted of murder through the first successful temporary insanity defense in American history.

The princess attended a performance of the Ringling Brothers Circus and fell in love with a lion cub. She had to have it. The circus agreed to sell, and the cub named Goldfleck moved into the Plaza Hotel, where he spent most of his days lounging in the princess’s bathtub. When the weather was pleasant, she walked him through Central Park on a leash, a sight New Yorkers accepted with weary tolerance.

When war erupted in Europe in 1914, the princess’s mysterious income dried up completely. She fled owing $12,000, leaving behind seized paintings. Goldfleck died and was buried at the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery. The princess herself lasted until 1923, dying in poverty in a cramped Manhattan room, surrounded by unsold paintings.

The suite she had occupied was cleaned, renovated, and rented to the next guest. The next exhibit checked in a few years later. In March 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, which sold out its initial print run in three days.

Two weeks later he married Zelda Sayre. They were thrown out of the Biltmore within a week, then the Commodore threw them out too. The Plaza somehow did not. The Fitzgeralds took most of their meals in the hotel’s basement grill room, holding court among drinkers and literary hangers-on.

According to legend, the couple once dove into the Pulitzer Fountain in front of the hotel in their underwear, splashing beneath the bronze statue of Pomona while guests watched from above. Whether it happened exactly that way no longer matters. The image became inseparable from who they were. Fitzgerald wrote the Plaza into his fiction with care.

In The Beautiful and Damned, his doomed couple haunts its corridors. In The Great Gatsby, the hotel hosts the novel’s climactic confrontation, the scene where Tom Buchanan destroys Jay Gatsby’s dream in a sweltering suite. Fitzgerald understood that the Plaza was not just a setting but a symbol of the wealth his characters craved and the emptiness they found when they grasped it. The Jazz Age roared on, then stopped.

The stock market crashed in October 1929, but the Fitzgeralds had been crashing longer. Scott’s drinking had progressed from charming to clinical. Zelda suffered her first serious breakdown in 1930. Scott died of a heart attack in December 1940 at forty-four, his books largely out of print.

Zelda outlived him by eight years, confined to Highland Hospital in North Carolina, where she died in a fire in March 1948. In the 1950s, a woman named Kay Thompson moved into the Plaza and refused to leave. She had come to MGM in the 1940s as a vocal arranger and coach, refining Judy Garland’s technique and working with Frank Sinatra and Lena Horne. She wanted more than the background.

In 1957 she nearly stole Funny Face from Audrey Hepburn, playing a fashion magazine editor with such crackling energy that audiences wondered why she was not the star of everything. Hollywood never quite figured out what to do with her, so she moved into the Plaza and conducted her life as if the entire hotel existed for her amusement. Somewhere in those years, a character began to emerge. Kay told stories about a six-year-old terror named Eloise who lived at the Plaza, ran through hallways, tormented staff, and poured water down the mail chute.

Friends demanded she write the stories down. She met illustrator Hilary Knight, and their collaboration was intense: Thompson would act out scenes, becoming Eloise completely, while Knight sketched furiously. Eloise appeared in 1955 and flew off bookstore shelves. The Plaza embraced its fictional resident with calculated enthusiasm, hanging a portrait of Eloise in the lobby where guests could pose beside the little girl who terrorized the halls.

The portrait vanished sometime in the late 1960s when a college rented the grand ballroom for a dance, and the painting was gone by morning. It was never recovered. Thompson died in July 1998 at eighty-eight years old in Liza Minnelli’s Manhattan apartment. In November 1966, Truman Capote was at the peak of his powers.

In Cold Blood had been published earlier that year, making its author rich beyond anything he had imagined. He decided to throw the perfect party. He chose the Plaza’s grand ballroom and November 28th, a Monday, because weekends were too obvious. He chose black and white as the only acceptable colors and masks to be worn until midnight.

He composed a guest list of 540 names in a black and white marble composition notebook, each selected with surgical precision. He invited Frank Sinatra and his young wife Mia Farrow. He invited Andy Warhol. He invited Kansas farmers who had befriended him during his research, placing them beside Vanderbilts and Rockefellers.

He also famously did not invite many people, and the exclusions generated almost as much coverage as the inclusions. The evening unfolded like a carefully orchestrated dream. Nearly 200 photographers jostled in the lobby, more than had shown up for the Beatles two years earlier. Capote greeted arrivals wearing a thirty-nine-cent mask.

Champagne flowed, with 450 bottles consumed by evening’s end. The menu was deliberately simple: chicken hash, spaghetti, and scrambled eggs, because the people were the spectacle. At midnight the masks came off. Norman Mailer nearly came to blows with McGeorge Bundy over the Vietnam War.

By two in the morning it was over. The newspapers confirmed what everyone present already knew: it had been the party of the century. What no one knew was that the party marked the beginning of Capote’s end. He never finished another major book.

In 1975 he published a chapter from his long-promised novel Answered Prayers in Esquire magazine, and the wealthy women he called his swans discovered he had been taking notes on their secrets all along. Doors that had always opened for him slammed shut. He died in August 1984 at fifty-nine in the Los Angeles home of Joanne Carson. The Beatles arrived on February 7, 1964, landing at JFK to find between three and five thousand teenagers waiting.

From the airport, a motorcade wound toward the Plaza, where thousands of fans surrounded the building and fifty police officers struggled to maintain order. The Beatles were installed on the twelfth floor in connecting suites that became their luxurious cage. George Harrison arrived with a fever and strep throat. John, Paul, and Ringo escaped to Central Park on February 8th for carefully controlled excursions.

The real conquest came the following night, when the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show before an estimated 73 million Americans. The performance lasted less than fifteen minutes and changed everything. Despite the chaos, hotel staff found the Beatles remarkably easy guests: polite, generous tippers, and quiet. When housekeeping finally entered the suites, they discovered one anomaly: every coat hanger had vanished.

The Plaza made clear they were not welcome back. In 1972, armed men stormed the hotel, took more than a dozen staff members hostage, and escaped with $265,000 in valuables, including an emerald tiara never recovered. The following year, letters threatened to blow up the building unless ransom was paid, signed by Black September. Police traced the threats to a house painter who needed money to open a restaurant.

The 1970s nearly destroyed the hotel, as a garbage strike left a seven-foot-tall pile of trash by the entrance and guests stepped over rats to reach the door. Donald Trump purchased the Plaza in 1988 for $390 million. By 1992, the hotel had accumulated $550 million in debt and filed for bankruptcy protection. Trump surrendered nearly half his ownership stake to his lenders, the only owner in the Plaza’s history to bankrupt the property.

He kept his name on the building anyway. In 2012, an Indian conglomerate called the Sahara Group purchased a stake in the hotel. The company’s founder, Subrata Roy, was arrested in 2014 for failing to appear at court hearings related to an alleged $4 billion investment scheme. From a small conference room in Tihar Jail, equipped with video screens and Wi-Fi, he attempted to negotiate the sale of his Plaza Hotel stake to raise the $1.

6 billion he needed for bail. For months, the legendary New York hotel was effectively managed from a prison cell. Roy was eventually released on parole in 2016 and died in 2023. The building has outlasted every person who ever walked through its doors.

The princess with her lion is gone. The novelist who jumped into the fountain is gone. The widows who paid their rent through two world wars are gone. The party of the century has become a paragraph in other people’s memoirs.

New owners come and go, as they always do. The chandeliers blaze, the elevators rise, and the doormen open doors for people whose names no one will remember. The Plaza does not care.

It remembers everything, and it will be here long after the rest of us are gone.