History
The Algonquin Hotel was originally designed as an apartment hotel, whose owner planned to rent rooms and suites on year-long leases. When few leases sold, the owner decided to turn it into a hotel which he was originally going to name "The Puritan." Frank Case, upon discovering that Algonquian tribes had been the first residents of the area, persuaded the owner to christen it "The Algonquin" instead.
Case took over the lease on the hotel in 1907 and bought the property on which the building sat in 1927 for USD $1 million. Case remained owner and manager of the hotel until his death in June 1946. In October that year, the Algonquin was purchased by Ben Bodne of Charleston, South Carolina for just over USD $1 million. Bodne undertook an extensive restoration and renovation effort. Bodne sold the hotel in 1987 to a group of Japanese investors and the Algonquin changed hands a number of times before ending up with Miller Global Properties in 2002. Following a two-year, USD $3 million renovation, the hotel was sold again in 2005 to HEI Hospitality.
HEI has affiliated it with Marriott International where it is part of Marriott’s Autograph Collection brand.
Read more about this topic: Algonquin Hotel
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (18381918)