Stepping from the elevator cab–an Art Deco triumph of polished Cuban plum-pudding wood veneer–one sees the deserted reception desk, and behind it, a tiny switchboard encased in 67-year-old oak.
Once, that switchboard vibrated with electricity and chatter, its little white and beet-red buttons rocketing with light, its matching red and white crayon-shaped plugs punched into hole after hole.
Reservations for the Cloud Club, the private and exclusively male dominion on the 66th, 67th and 68th floors of the Chrysler Building at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, piled up.
Hands were shaken and the heavily padded shoulders of suits were slapped. Deals died and were reborn, consummated by the most successful denizens of the megalopolis.
The Chrysler Building had all it took for luck, including, above all, a magnificent flair. A sleek and shining wackiness endeared it to passers-by who still sometimes stand in the street and gawk at its frieze of hubcaps, its banner of racing cars and its red Moroccan marble lobby visible through black stone portals. But the building has also known tough times.
Now, in the midst of a foreclosure action and complaints about wind whistling through its famous triangular windows, there is a chance that the Chrysler Building–or at least part of it–will become a hotel.
Well-heeled tourists may wake up where ink-stained clerks and their millionaire bosses witnessed the wrath of the Great Depression. And the phones at the Cloud Club, empty since 1979, may start ringing again.
Letters are going out to an undisclosed number of hotel and condominium developers asking how much money they would be willing to spend on redeveloping the 1930 tower.
Just as developers of new condominium buildings try to line up a “prestige” retailer before the banks will lend them money, so, too, are representatives of Fuji Bank, which holds the mortgage, determined to demonstrate how much revenue the Chrysler Building could yield if it were redeveloped.
“There is a trend now to explore alternative uses for office buildings,” said Woody Heller, who is handling the solicitations for Jones Lang Wootton, the sales agent for Fuji Bank. “Look at what’s going on downtown around Wall Street.”
The Chrysler Building is owned by the estate of Jack Kent Cooke, who also owned the Washington Redskins. Cooke bought the 77-story skyscraper in 1979 for $87 million and remortgaged it in the white-hot 1980s for $250 million. After his death last spring, the bank filed foreclosure papers, saying the estate had missed three mortgage payments.
“Simply speaking, we aim to identify the highest and best use for the building, including residential and hotel use,” Heller said.
People in the development community say that all the biggest names in hotel development are being approached, including Marriott, Westin, Doubletree and, of course, Donald Trump, who has said he isn’t interested.
“When 45 people are lining up to bid on something, you know you aren’t going to get a bargain,” he said glumly.
But one man is definitely interested, one who was approached first and has already drawn up a $180 million proposal to lease 18 floors of the building to transform them into a 500-room, $250-a-night hotel, with a restored Cloud Club as its private oasis.
The man, Bernard Goldberg–real estate lawyer, boutique hotelier and spinner of fantasies, whose offices are on the 42nd floor of the building in question–knows that in at least some people’s minds he doesn’t stand a chance up against the Marriotts of this world.
“If they have good taste,” he said recently with bravado and a big smile, “I’ll definitely get it.” And if they don’t have good taste? “Then I wouldn’t want to guess.”
Goldberg is 64, a man who still wears white shirts and dark suits, a man who can overflow with bonhomie one minute and a turn into a blunt wheeler-dealer the next.
“I live on the Upper East Side, and one day I walked by the Hotel Wales, a rundown, derelict kind of place of not great repute,” he began, spinning out the tale of how he came to bid on 18 floors–actually 21, including the Cloud Club–of the Chrysler Building. “The lobby floor was littered with coffee cups and newspapers. The front desk was a mess. They were getting $40 or $50 a night–or $20 an hour, or whatever.”
Whenever a real estate lawyer and developer sees a piece of property just begging to be bought, he tries to buy it.
“At 92nd Street and Madison Avenue, the Wales was in a very upscale area, near the Stanhope and the Carlyle, who were getting $300 to $450 a night,” Goldberg continued.
The hotel was in the heart of Carnegie Hill, a family neighborhood near Mt. Sinai Hospital. So he started thinking of those families putting up relatives, of patients’ friends and families coming from great distances, and ultimately bought the Wales for $7.75 million, about half what the owner originally asked. After spending $2 million to remodel, he opened the new Wales and started charging $125 a night.
“Then we got thinking there were more things we could do,” he recalled. “We bought Oriental carpets for the Pied Piper room on the second floor, which was a rabbit warren of old lighting fixtures and junk, but had been a ballroom when the hotel opened in 1904.” He bought a $30,000 Steinway B grand piano for free Sunday evening musicales. And he raised the price to $185 a night.
Over the last eight years, Goldberg’s company, the Gotham Hospitality Group, has transformed five hotels. His latest, the Shoreham, at 33 W. 55th St., will more than double in size, to 174 rooms, with the acquisition of the office building next door. At the Shoreham, which has the restaurant La Caravelle as a tenant, rates are $215 to $225 a night.
In one sense–that of the boutique hotelier–Goldberg compares himself to Ian Schrager, whom he credits with genius for his work on the Royalton and the Paramount, for hiring Philippe Starck and Andree Putman. But while his rooms rent for less, he is clearly moving upward: He has hired Rafael Vinoly to redo the Roger Williams, at 31st Street and Madison Avenue, where the renovation is three-quarters finished.
Nevertheless, Goldberg sees himself as more of a preservationist; chic perhaps, but not hip.
“What we do is restore it and bring it back,” he said. “We don’t rip apart if the bones are there.”
The bones of the Chrysler Building are definitely there: from the small humidor room to the right of the reception desk of the Cloud Club (full of numbered lockers that, if you concentrate, still smell of tobacco) to the intimate speak-easy where, again, there are wood lockers–lockers with carved hieroglyphics on their doors to prevent federal agents from identifying the illegal drinkers during Prohibition.
There are good bones, too, on Floors 25 through 43, where he wants to put the rooms.
Those floors are part of what is known as the tower section; at 9,000 square feet apiece, they are just the right size to carve into hotel rooms.
That layout means plenty of windows, large enough rooms and space for a service corridor and the irresistible elevators, each veneered in a different wood: Japanese ash, American walnut, English gray hardwood, Asian walnut, curly maple.
Use of the new Cloud Club would be included in the cost of rooms at the Hotel Chrysler, the name he loves.
Right now, he is toying with using the former speak-easy as a “very private wine club, with only the wealthiest people, people who drink ’61 Lafites and ’61 Latours–you know the kind of people I’m talking about.”
In his plan for the Cloud Club, the reception area–including the little oak switchboard–would stay as it is. So would the humidor room and the speak-easy, along with one of the great lavatories of all time, the tiny-tiled gray, black, blue and white men’s room, with its seven pure-white porcelain pedestal sinks, its narrow chrome-framed mirrors and its thick swirled marble partitions. (The much smaller women’s room is great, but, alas, not as great–a sign of the times.)
The double-height ballroom with the 1930 Manhattan skyline mural by Gardner Hale would be enlarged: the nondescript end wall would be torn out and a dismal storage area lightened only by a line of triangular windows would be incorporated into a grand party hall. And, as if more special effects were needed, Goldberg plans to add a musicians’ balcony, with harps and flutes playing “Rhapsody in Blue” over afternoon tea.
On the middle Cloud Club level, the 67th floor, the existing barroom would be stripped of its 1940s and 1950s excrescences, including the tacky metal chandeliers, and become a luncheon room.
Another room, more Gothic than Deco, would be a place for drinking and schmoozing, stocked with Beluga caviar, smoked salmon and melon balls. The best room of all, Walter P. Chrysler’s private Deco dining room–with its magnificent wraparound polished black glass mural depicting the creation of the automobile–would remain a small, exclusive, private dining room, seating 8 or 10 of the most powerful of New York’s supermagnates, just as in the old days.
The top Cloud Club floor, surrounded by those famous windows through which one can espy the rival Empire State Building–would become another cocktail lounge.
Michael Fishbin, one of the city’s leading hotel analysts and a partner at E&Y Kenneth Leventhal, called the idea of the Hotel Chrysler “a real grabber, a fabulous idea.”
“Clearly, the New York City hotel market is going through an unbelievable boom,” he said, “and by working with an existing structure, you can save 30 percent of the cost of ground-up construction.” The building is in an extremely good location, he said, especially in view of what he called the “renaissance of 42nd Street.”
And while the Marriott chain would be a front-runner for the opportunity–the chain is already converting part of an office building at Third Avenue and 52nd Street into a hotel–Fishbin said Westin and Doubletree are also known to be looking at properties in Manhattan.
But then there is Goldberg.
“He’s clearly a visionary,” Fishbin said.
