A Walk in the Park
How a Historic New York City Hotel Uses the Arts to Show Off its Neighborhood.
By Arnold Berke | Online Only | Aug. 1, 2008
New York City's Essex House opened in 1931
Credit: Jumeirah Essex House
Since it opened in 1931, Essex House, with its telescoping profile, restrained art deco trim, and legendary rooftop sign, has been a prominent hotel on Central Park South, a street wall of towers that shows off some of the best of 20th-century Manhattan.
Newly renovated, the 44-story structure, renamed Jumeirah Essex House since its 2005 acquisition by Dubai-based Jumeirah Group, last year joined Historic Hotels of America (HHA), a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation that markets 211 of these one-of-a-kind landmarks. Like other Historic Hotels of America, Essex House puts guests in touch with its history—stories about its architecture, interior design, and notable guests.
Many Historic Hotels of America also celebrate the neighborhoods around them, and for Jumeirah Essex House, this means Central Park, just across the street. Essex House sends guests on self-guided walking tours with an MP3 player and detailed maps to describe natural and architectural hotspots. Two tours (produced with the popular Web site CentralPark.com) are available: The family tour visits such treasures as the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, Children's Zoo, Loeb Boathouse, Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, and the tree-canopied promenade known as the Mall. Those up for more can extend their ear-budded amble on the arts and architecture tour—adding landmarks like the Obelisk, Belvedere Castle, Bow Bridge, Swedish Cottage, and the Strawberry Fields mosaic, a tribute to Beatle John Lennon.
Artist Mark Innerst's interpretation of the neighborhood around Essex House
Credit: Jumeirah Essex House
The hotel also mounted an ambitious artists-in-residence program. Displayed in its lobby is "The Heart of Central Park," an exhibition of more than 70 reprints of photos, paintings, and drawings that encompass the preserve's century-and-a-half life. Guests linger at the pictures, absorbed by the tales they tell—a 1920 model-boat regatta on Conservatory Water, for instance, an 1890 idyll at the Sheep Meadow (when sheep still grazed there), and a 1934 open-air dance at the Naumburg Band Shell.
Curator Katherine Gass says, "I spent many, many hours in the dusty archives," chiefly at the Museum of the City of New York. The show has proved so popular, she says, that it will remain on view indefinitely. "People now know Essex House as a place where culture happens."
Gass also commissioned two artworks for the lobby that interpret the mingling of park and city. One is a pair of large, long-exposure color photos of Literary Walk, at the southern end of the Mall, taken by Korean photographer Atta Kim. Each photo contrasts the ghostly traces left by people moving, over an eight-hour stretch, past trees, walkways, statues, and distant architecture. The other work is a painting by York, Pa., artist Mark Innerst of Central Park South looking east, in which the mass of soft green foliage on the left ends abruptly at the soaring wall of buildings on the right. Innerst portrays the structures as abstract forms, lending them a monumentality suggestive of the famous architectural renderings of Hugh Ferriss, though with much more color. (Lobby guests can also admire an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall model of the hotel built entirely of LEGO bricks.)
The distant city, trees, and statues are among the fixed elements in Atta Kim’s long-exposure photos of the park.
Credit: Atta Kim
In the near future, the hotel will display the winning photos from an online contest, conducted with CentralPark.com, which rates park photos submitted to the site according to each season of the year. In the meantime, Essex House has pursued more partnerships, working with Tiffany and Co., for example, to create jewelry that replicates a rosette from the historic art deco doors leading to the hotel's restaurant.
Together, the park tours and arts program echo the slogan the hotel adopted in 1931 for its first ad campaign: "Always in touch with the Park. Never out of touch with the City."
Other Historic Hotels of America that interpret their neighborhoods include:
● The American Club Resort Hotel, Kohler, Wis., offers tours of its building (a 1918 boarding house for Kohler Co. workers) and of the surrounding village—including the plumbing-ware factory, Kohler mansion (the Waelderhaus), and public gardens. A history museum, book, and flyers give even more background on the Kohlers and their remarkable town.
● Lancaster Arts Hotel, Lancaster, Pa., trains its front-desk staff to know what's what in the old downtown and neighborhoods, and promotes the Historic Lancaster Walking Tour and the do-it-yourself East King Street Walking Tour. Special packages showcase local greats like painter Charles Demuth, including a private tour of his house. Guests also can relax in their rooms with histories of the city and the hotel (an 1881 tobacco warehouse).
● Hotel El Convento, San Juan, P.R., built in 1651, offers packages that include walking tours and free museum visits in surrounding Old San Juan, a World Heritage Site. The hotel also arranges special tours of such landmarks as La Fortaleza (1540), the governor's mansion, and La Casa Blanca (1521), the Ponce de Leon family home. Hotel maps and other publications help guests explore the neighborhood on their own.
● The Stonewall Jackson Hotel, Staunton, Va., sends patrons to the nearby visitors center for a free city trolley ride. Also available, through Staunton Guided Tours, is a narrated trolley and walking tour of the revitalized downtown, rich in history and Victorian architecture. Led by master story teller Marney Gibbs, the tour visits the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, restored train station, and many other landmarks.
● Jekyll Island Club Hotel, Jekyll Island, Ga., sponsors lectures (from "Early English Settlement in Coastal Georgia" to "The Gilded Age"), living-history performances, and special Preservation Month tours. In the 1888 building's lobby is a well-captioned array of historic photographs of island life. The adjacent state park gives tours and interpretive programs delving into the lives of both the aristocracy and those who worked for them.
Learn more about Historic Hotels of America at www.historichotels.org.
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