History
The Hotel Pennsylvania was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad and operated by Ellsworth Statler. It opened on January 25, 1919 and was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White, which also designed the original Pennsylvania Station located across the street. (The old Pennsylvania Station was razed in 1963 to make room for Madison Square Garden and the redeveloped below-ground station in use today.)
Statler Hotels, which had managed the Pennsylvania since its construction, acquired the property outright in 1948 and renamed it the Hotel Statler. Following the sale of all 17 Statler hotels to Conrad Hilton in 1954, the hotel became The Statler Hilton. It operated under this name until the early 1980s, when Hilton sold the hotel. It was renamed The New York Statler for a brief period and was operated by Dunfey hotels, a division of Aer Lingus. It was then purchased in 1984 by the Penta Hotels chain, a joint-venture of British Airways, Lufthansa and Swissair, becoming The New York Penta. In 1992 Penta went out of business and the hotel returned to its original name, Hotel Pennsylvania.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)