Hotel Elysée
Hotel in Manhattan, New York / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hotel Elysée is a hotel on 60 East 54th Street between Madison and Park Avenues in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The hotel was founded in 1926 as a European-style hotel for the carriage trade by Swiss-born Max Haering.[1]
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New York's leading hatcheck concessionaire, Mayer Quain, purchased the hotel out of bankruptcy in 1937. After the War, his children eclectically designed every room so that no two rooms were alike. In lieu of traditional numbers, the rooms were named to reflect their personality, such as the "Sayonara" suite assigned to Marlon Brando after his starring role in Teahouse of the August Moon. Tennessee Williams lived in the hotel for fifteen years and died in the "Sunset" suite.
Columnist Jimmy Breslin, who regards the Elysée as "a great hotel, a genuine New York landmark," succeeded Ruark as the hotel's unofficial chronicler. Upon Tennessee Williams's death at the Elysée in February 1983, Breslin recalled the story of a transient guest who called the front desk at 5:00 am complaining that someone in the next suite was keeping her awake by typing all night. "They knew right away who the culprit was, but they couldn't very well ask Mr. Williams to stop playwriting, so we simply moved the guest to another room."
In November 1948, Tallulah Bankhead celebrated President Harry S. Truman's victory over Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 United States presidential election by throwing a noisy party at the hotel that ran non-stop for five days and nights.