The Pierre

GALLERY

Inside of it, there are some circular duplex ballrooms in the penthouse, which before served as huge supper clubs and to organize parties. With their double-height windows and painted murals in their walls, they were sometimes used as lookouts by the Police, according to a hotel employee. In fact, there are some grand views of Central Park form its terraces. Originally, the hotel had 714 rooms, but some of them had been combined to form suites; so now the hotel has 189 gest accommodations, 49 suites and 11 grand suites. The price to book a room for a night can go from 400€ to 1.300€.

The Pierre is next to Central Park, so it’s a perfect location if you want to go for a walk or just relax with the incredible views in the fantastic terraces that it has. If you can afford it!

The construction and design of the project was charged to the company of architects Schultze and Weaver. The design of the building reminds the French architecture. It’s a “skyscraper that rises in a blond brick shaft forma a limestone-fronted Louis XVI base”. The top of the building, which is easily recognizable in the New York skyline, is based on the Mansart’s Royal Chapel at Versailles. This well-known ceiling is composed of a series of Corinthian pilasters, united by “arch-headed windows, with octagonal ends”. All of this, under a 160 meter-high jungle-green copper roof pierced with bronze bull’s-eye dormers.

The building itself looks like a Seventeen Century composition, and establish a contrast between the majority of New York City architecture, more futuristic and contemporary. Its style responds to Art Deco, a quite popular architectonic style that shares with the Chrysler building or the American Radiator. The main body of this edifice is not especially remarkable: “a three-stage platform, a series of setbacks surmounted by a tower from which the elevators partly blind the south façade.” However, the first two floors are quite unusual, modelled spaces with three separated entries. This and the copper roof are the most distinguishable elements of the 41 floor building.

In 1930, Charles Pierre Casalasco, a Wall Street financier, decided to build a hotel next to Central Park, named The Pierre. He started this project just after the Great Depression, so it soon fell in decadence. At first, the Pierre was a great business; but then the guests would begin to pay more and more for their rooms, just to afford the hotel’s decadence. Finally, in 1932 John Paul Getty bought the building for $2.5million, reaffirming the bankruptcy that Pierre Casalasco was undergoing (he had spent $15million in the construction of the hotel). Since 2005 it is part of the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces luxury hotel and resorts chain.