New York Biltmore Hotel - Role in History and Popular Culture

Role in History and Popular Culture

The Treaty of the Danish West Indies of 1916 was signed at the hotel, which transferred possession of the Danish West Indies, now the United States Virgin Islands, from Denmark to the United States. In 1942, the hotel was the location of the Biltmore Conference which was a meeting of mostly Zionist groups that produced the Biltmore Program, a series of demands regarding Palestine.

The reclusive writer J. D. Salinger would meet William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, under the Biltmore's lobby clock. It is one of many that claim to be the basis for the expression "Meet me under the clock." The office building retains the hotel's famous piano and lobby clock.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's early short story "May Day", a main character, Edith, continually asserts that she is staying at the Biltmore. Fitzgerald seems to deliberately associate the Biltmore with Jazz Age luxury and lifestyle.

The Biltmore was the scene of the feminist struggle in the 1960s and 1970s when the city Human Rights Commission ordered the hotel to open its Men's Bar, which was for years a male-only establishment with regulars like New York mayor (and later governor) Al Smith, to female patrons. The bar, which was subsequently renamed the Biltmore Bar, was located on Madison Avenue and 43rd Street.

In the fourth episode of the first season of The Cosby Show (titled "You're Not a Mother Night" and originally airing on December 6, 1984), Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) vows to take his wife Clair (Phylicia Rashad) to the Biltmore hotel for dinner and book them there to spend the night. To his wife, Cliff says, "I know the manager. I delivered his baby and he owes me because the baby does not look like him or his wife."