Dave Bowman observes himself old as the age of the universe. Alone in the hotel room, he perceives that time runs slowly on the evanescent pavement, he feels that his body from outer space is no longer the one he had, but the embryo of a new form of post-human life. End of the novel. Arthur C. Clarke leaves the table where the 2001 handwritten ream rests : A Space Odyssey and lies down, overcome by exhaustion, in his bed in room 603 of the Chelsea Hotel. A legend is born.
If it is by anecdote, there is no other place in the world with more personal stories than this New York accommodation. Impossible to get even closer to the panoply of writers, thinkers, musicians, painters, sculptors, designers, visual artists or movie stars that has housed this hotel on 23rd Street in New York for almost a century and a half of history. Closed in 2011, it hopes to reopen after a controversial remodel due to ongoing property disputes with the neighborhood.
A separate hotel, bed and towels, is that place of memory where the characters who lived there still reside. They roam the corridors that we now cross, the tiles that we tread today tread, they rest on the balconies that invite us to rediscover yesterday. Fifty years, a century, even five centuries later.
In 1499, Isabel de Castilla and Fernando de Aragón agreed to found a royal hospital next to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela to welcome those pilgrims who arrived in the city battered by the vicissitudes of the Camino. The Hostal de los Reyes Católicos, today the flagship of the national network of Paradores and recognizable from any end of the Plaza del Obradoiro for its Plateresque façade, is listed as the oldest hotel in Europe.
Three centuries later, in the square that symbolized the conjunction of the Tuileries gardens with the Champs Elysées, currently known as Concordia, Queen Marie Antoinette was guillotined in front of the hotel she had frequented so much since her arrival in Paris, where she he would meet his friends at court and take piano lessons in one of the classrooms. The Crillon, built in 1758 and completely remodeled in 2017, has been hosting throughout its history the most distinguished of world celebrities. Suffice it to say that from the favorite suite of the late musician Leonard Bernstein, at the price of 14,000 euros, you can enjoy a terrace with views of the Eiffel Tower unique in the city.
If the famous Crillon has always hosted a proven VIP clientele, there is another mythical establishment, with all the glamor of the French Riviera, which welcomes the so-called VIPs (very, very important person; very, very important people). It is Le Negresco, in Nice, founded in 1913 by the Romanian immigrant Henri Negrescu, who hung a chandelier with 16,309 Baccarat crystals commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II over the main hall. The list of personalities housed in its 119 rooms and 22 suites is endless, although none more eccentric than the painter Dalí, some of whose creations can still be seen in their interiors. Its workers comply with rigorous etiquette, uniformed in the style of the eighteenth century. Across the Promenade des Anglais, the hotel offers its private beach.
Two illustrious surnames from the hospitality industry, Ritz and Escoffier, were immortalized at the Savoy Hotel, in the heart of London City. Its innovations today would produce hilarity, but they were quite an event on its opening day, August 6, 1889. It was the first British accommodation to have electric lighting, elevators, hot water, and a bathroom in every room. These Englishmen, of course, knew how to represent the excellence of their empire. At that time, the businessman Thomas Cook, the first to create an organized trip, was already planning the opening of a resort for wealthy Europeans on the banks of the Nile, opposite the populous Aswan, the southernmost city in Egypt. Agatha Christie spent long periods of smearing pages on the terrace of the Old Cataract, from which she conceived her famous novel Death on the Nile (1937). A suite named after him and another to the memory of another sanctified guest here, Sir Winston Churchill, cloud the view of the modern traveler with its high Empire-style ceilings, mahogany cabinets, and fully-padded bathrooms.
Two years before the London Savoy opened, Rudyard Kipling took a seat at the Singapore Raffles Hotel bar, newly built in honor of the founder of the Asian city, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and began to write — to say some - the first notes of The Jungle Book, which he completed during his subsequent isolation in Vermont (United States). Hotel that years later, in 1932, would house Charlie Chaplin.
If great literary works have been written in some hotels, others have become cinematographic enclaves. At the junction of Fifth Avenue with 59th Street, south of Central Park, is the Plaza de las Filmas. How famous he has not stepped on his carpets since its opening in 1907. Also politicians and magnates, none were missing. Writers, either. Its Renaissance château façade inspired Scott Fitzgerald's ambience in The Great Gatsby . Miles Davis and Billie Holiday recorded an LP in the Persian salon in the late 1950s. The Beatles hid here on their first North American tour, with the rhythmic pause necessary to compose their song Michelle. Woody Allen took refuge in one of the rooms to announce at a press conference in August 1992 his love for Soon-Yi Previn. Even the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, owned this glittering limousine and horse carriage scene between 1988 and 1995. Here he made a cameo in Solo en casa 2 (1992) and, a year later, here he married in second nuptials, and before some 1,100 guests, with Marla Maples.
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