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:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)