NEW YORK -- A deal
concluded between the owner of New Yorks Plaza Hotel and its unions
ensures that the propertys beloved public spaces will be preserved
and will continue to be available to the public.
Those public spaces
include the Grand Ballroom, the Oak Bar, the Oak Room and the Palm
Court.
A spokeswoman for
the new owners, Elad Properties, said that although it was not
widely realized, the owner had always intended to maintain the way
most of those spaces were used; only the future use of the Grand
Ballroom had been in question.
Concerns over plans
for the landmark hotel, including a conversion of most rooms to
condos, produced lots of controversy and street
demonstrations.
Elad cooled the
rhetoric considerably by agreeing to increase the number of hotel
rooms to be preserved to about 350 of the current 805 -- 200 more
than originally planned. The number of condos will fall from 200 to
150. The hotel rooms will be on the side that faces 58th Street,
while the condos will face Central Park.
To accommodate the
new layout, its likely that the amount of retail space originally
contemplated will have to be reduced, said the
spokeswoman.
The plan, which
results from several days of negotiations with hotel unions, also
saves about 350 of 900 jobs, twice the number originally
envisioned.
The Plaza will
close for renovations April 30, as planned, and is slated to reopen
in late 2006.
It is no accident
that the pact between Elad and the unions seems to have pre-empted
a proposed city law that would have limited hoteliers options for
converting properties to residential housing.
The controversial
proposal, sponsored by more than half of the City Council
membership and supported by the unions, was to have been the
subject of a hearing on the day the Plaza pact was announced by New
York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, fittingly in the Plazas Grand
Ballroom.
The hearing was
indefinitely postponed, but noting a continuing and underlying
concern about future hotel space in New York, the mayor said he
would establish a roundtable of interested parties to evaluate the
citys hotel industry and ways to keep it healthy.
To contact the
reporter who wrote this article, send e-mail to Nadine Godwin at [email protected].