On the corner of East Sixty-third Street and Lexington Avenue, in a building where the apartments sell for anywhere from one million to thirteen million dollars, there is a woman who pays around a hundred and thirteen dollars a month in rent. She lives on the fourth floor, and has maid service two days a week, a front-desk staff to take her messages, and a private bricked terrace at the end of her hall.
That woman is one of a handful who have lived in this twenty-three-story building for decades, through renovations and condominium conversions; as the World Trade Center rose and fell and was rebuilt; as miniskirts gave way to bell-bottoms and then to skinny jeans; as newspapers went on strike and transit workers went on strike and teachers went on strike; as civil-rights marchers and gay-rights protesters took to the streets; as crime waves gave way to market booms. These women checked into the Barbizon Hotel and—even though it technically no longer exists—they never left.
New York City once had more than a hundred residential hotels, places like the Algonquin, where Dorothy Parker and James Thurber held court by day and laid their heads at night; and the Carlyle, where President Kennedy kept an apartment; and the Plaza, whose most famous resident was fictional, the six-year-old Eloise, who lived in her “pink, pink, pink” room. Most of these hotels were curiosities of long-since-reformed real-estate regulations, exempt from building-height restrictions and from fire-safety regulations, so long as they did not have kitchens in their guest rooms. Some of them opened in the late nineteenth century, though most were built around the time of the First World War; few had the cultural cachet of the Barbizon. The subject of films and of novels, the Barbizon was also a mainstay of the society pages. Actresses like Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Phylicia Rashad, and Cybill Shepherd took their beauty sleep there, walking the same halls as writers like Sylvia Plath and Peggy Noonan and riding the same elevators as the future First Lady Nancy Reagan.
The historian Paulina Bren, in her new book, “The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free” (Simon & Schuster), chronicles the experiences of these women, and of some of the hundreds of thousands of others like them, who stayed in the hotel. More than a biography of a building, the book is an absorbing history of labor and women’s rights in one of the country’s largest cities, and also of the places that those women left behind to chase their dreams. In Bren’s telling, some of the same forces that brought them to Manhattan led to the end of the Barbizon as they knew it—and to the New York City that we know today.
The Barbizon was not Manhattan’s first hotel exclusively for women—that was Alexander T. Stewart’s Hotel for Working Women, on Fourth Avenue, which opened in 1878 and closed within a year. But the Barbizon was larger, more fashionable, and more successful. The seven hundred or so women staying there on any given night had access to a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a library, lecture halls, soundproof music rooms, a rooftop garden, and first-floor businesses including a hairdresser, a dry cleaner, a pharmacy, and hosiery and millinery shops. There was a free afternoon tea for guests. Male visitors were barred from the residential floors.
The hotel’s Upper East Side corner lot, previously the site of Temple Rodeph Sholom, had cost its developers nearly a million dollars, and they spent another four million on construction. The modern amenities and the neo-Gothic style of the skyscraper were designed to appeal to young women from the middle and upper classes; the limited access for men and the letters of recommendation that the Barbizon required of guests were meant to appease their parents. Those parents wanted to believe that the hotel was run like a nunnery, but for their daughters it was more like a sorority. For more than three decades, Mae Sibley, officially an assistant manager and unofficially the front-desk bouncer, screened for what she called “the right kind of girl,” assigning letter grades to would-be residents based on their age and their looks: A’s were for women under twenty-eight, while those over thirty-eight were lucky to get C’s.
The Barbizon was named for a school of naturalist painters in nineteenth-century France, but its glamorous clientele quickly earned it the nickname the Dollhouse. When the hotel opened, in 1927, flappers and new women were all the rage—and also a reliable source of outrage. Women had won the right to vote in 1920, but their appetite for other rights generated a backlash, including new laws and regulations meant to control their lives before and after marriage. Hotels regularly refused to accommodate female travellers who arrived alone after dark, the implication being that any such woman was a prostitute. New York is thought to have had more speakeasies during Prohibition than anywhere else in America, and some of the most notorious among them were run by women, including Mary (Texas) Guinan, a gunslinging movie star turned hostess, and Belle Livingstone, a stage actress who’d had four husbands and ran nearly as many wet night clubs, most of them shut down by the Feds almost as fast as she opened them. (Though not before she had supposedly served Al Capone, John D. Rockefeller, an English duke, and Russian noblemen—on the same night.) When alcohol became legal again, in 1933, some bars banned women entirely, and others required them to have an escort if they wanted to drink. By then, women were attending college and entering the workforce at higher rates than ever before; in response, half the states in the country made it illegal for them to hold a job if they were married.
The Barbizon pitched itself as a kind of middle ground between the old and the new, offering young women a safe and respectable place to stay, while also offering them entrée into whatever sort of life they desired: careers, if they wanted to be working women; cosmopolitan dating pools, if they were looking for a husband. The hotel had club rooms for some of the Seven Sisters schools, and it cultivated special relationships with certain employers and institutions—which, taken together, suggest the range of occupations that women of this particular class were allowed to pursue at the time.
Students from the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School, for instance, had a private dining room and lived on two floors of the Barbizon while they learned typing and shorthand and attended what some people considered charm school. They were required to don hats and white gloves; they studied art with László Moholy-Nagy and literature with Mark Van Doren. Until the Civil War, secretaries were mostly male, but “Gibbs girls” were part of the wave of women who feminized the field.
Besides the “Gibblets,” the Barbizon was home to a number of Powers models, women who were under contract with the John Robert Powers Agency. Many of these women had used beauty-pageant winnings to buy their bus tickets to New York and aspired to appear in Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogues. All the models who signed with Powers got the same matching black hatbox and filled it with the accessories and makeup that they carried to shoots around the city. As prestigious as it was to be part of what is thought to be the world’s first modelling agency, Powers models could not always make a living from the infrequent gigs and irregular income. Take Celeste Gheen, who was profiled in this magazine in 1940. Her early years with Powers were rough: nearly half her wages went to covering the weekly eleven-dollar Barbizon rent, and she went home to Cleveland after a nervous breakdown. She returned to New York, spent another few years building up her reputation, and eventually averaged fifteen or twenty hours of work a week, having become the face—or the limbs, or the lips—of five cigarette brands, Spam, Texaco, Oldsmobile, Log Cabin syrup, Schaefer’s beer, Bayer aspirin, Bon Ami cleanser, Simmons Beautyrest mattresses, and Hellmann’s mayonnaise. (She once made fifty-five dollars by taking a full-body bath in Colman’s mustard.) But even successful models struggled between paychecks and were frustrated by how long agencies took to pay them. One night at the Barbizon, a woman named Eileen Ford listened to a friend complain about these conditions and decided that agencies should treat the models—rather than the photographers or the advertisers—as their clients. She founded her own agency, which went on to represent the likes of Candice Bergen, Martha Stewart, Christie Brinkley, and Brooke Shields.
A common venue for the work of these models was women’s magazines like Mademoiselle, which was founded in 1935 and not long afterward developed a guest-editor program that offered college students internships in New York, during which they stayed at the Barbizon. The editor-in-chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell increased the magazine’s circulation more than fivefold, and cultivated a new readership, which ranged from teen-age girls to career women. She published Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, and Edward Albee, among others, and made the internship program one of the most prestigious in the country, decreeing that “the staff must get younger every year, even if it kills them in the process.”
The Millies, as the guest editors were known, numbered one or two dozen each summer. Many went on to writing careers, including Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Gael Greene, and Meg Wolitzer. In her novel “The Bell Jar,” Plath fictionalized Mademoiselle as Ladies’ Day and the Barbizon as the Amazon, including details from her own fateful last night at the hotel, when she threw every article of clothing she had brought to the city off the roof, a gesture some Millies saw as a catharsis, others as a sign of despair. Didion began her essay “Goodbye to All That” with her arrival in New York for the internship. Greene returned to the Barbizon in 1957 to write a series of articles for the Post—not about the hotel per se, but about the kinds of women who lived there. She designated some of them “lone women” who checked in and never checked out, forsaking husbands for work or enduring hotel life because, as she tells it, they never found a way to get to the suburbs. “Our town,” the series teased, “is full of them. They come—looking for careers, romance, adventure, an escape from boredom. What happens to them once they get here? What of their high hopes for spectacular success, their dreams of marriage to a handsome prince charming? Can they overcome the universal fears of metropolitan bachelor girls—fear of failure, fear of spinsterhood, fear of sexual assault?”
Greene’s exposé drew attention to what the Barbizon and plenty of other social institutions of the era had tried to keep hidden: the depression and the despair experienced by so many mid-century women who were striving for careers while facing systematic discrimination, and pursuing sexual independence while being judged by the mores of earlier generations. In addition to secret abortions and covered-up suicides, there were women who could never afford their own apartment, and families who lived in residential hotels because they had nowhere else to go. Despite its reputation, the Barbizon had never housed only ingénues. The future diplomat and reproductive-rights advocate Robin Chandler Duke lived at the hotel as a teen-ager, sharing a tiny room with her mother and sister when her father could no longer support them. One of the earliest residents was the activist and actress Molly Brown, who famously survived the sinking of the Titanic but found herself financially strapped after her estranged husband, a millionaire, died intestate.
Almost all the women in Bren’s book are white, a reflection of the demographics of the Barbizon’s clientele. “The Upper East Side was New York’s whitest of white enclaves,” Bren writes, before telling the story of the woman she suspects to have been the first Black guest at the hotel. In 1956, Barbara Chase-Riboud, a student at Temple University, won one of the Mademoiselle guest editorships. Already a distinguished artist with work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, she would go on to publish a best-selling novel about Sally Hemings. But, during her internship, Chase-Riboud was asked to leave the room whenever clients who opposed integration came to the Madison Avenue office for meetings. She was not allowed to participate in the summer fashion show and was never invited to use the swimming pool in the basement of the Barbizon. She did, however, appear in Mademoiselle, photographed with her fellow-Millies for the annual college issue, which also included an article about the activist Autherine Lucy’s desegregation of the University of Alabama.
The civil-rights movement took place mostly outside the walls of the Barbizon—although Bren suggests that the fight for equality may have had something to do with the hotel’s demise. In 1963, the same year that Plath published “The Bell Jar,” Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” offering the sort of women who stayed at the Barbizon a way of seeing themselves in the feminist movement. And in 1970, when Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Holmes Norton led marchers down Fifth Avenue, they were calling for an end to gender discrimination of all kinds, technically including same-sex housing like that offered by the Barbizon. After New York City began making sex a protected category in its anti-discrimination laws, the hotel petitioned the Commission on Human Rights for an exemption—as did the New York Mets, which wanted permission to keep holding Ladies Day eight games a year.
That petition soon became irrelevant. Real-estate trends were making residential hotels like the Barbizon obsolete. Shared bathrooms and common kitchens were out; luxury co-ops and condos were in. A consultant tasked with reviving the Barbizon by renovating the space and attracting new residents discovered that more than a hundred of the women living in the hotel were protected by rent control or rent stabilization. He disparaged them as lonely hearts like those Greene had written about decades before, claiming that they loitered in the lobby in curlers and slippers, heckled younger guests, and opposed integrating the hotel with male guests. In reality, of course, management was just eager to replace them with higher-paying clientele. But the Women, as they were called, understandably did not agree with that characterization and did not want to move, and they found an effective leader for their resistance in the Crown Publishing editor Alice Sachs, who, during her more than forty years at the hotel, took on Tammany Hall and served as Manhattan Democratic Commissioner. Sachs and the other women were paying a fourth of the average rent for the area, and they banded together to retain a tenant-rights lawyer.
