Cruising the Net today (having finally passed the kidney stone - more on that later) I came across this intriguing piece about the renovation and re-naming of a legendary New Orleans landmark. And a place that holds special memories for me of going out with friends for a night of dancing and cokes at the Blue Room, or just me and a date. It was a classy place and opulent to say the least. This tells some great stories, happy, bizarre, and sad, but all worth the read.
Go on, read the rest HERE. Yes, it's a year old, but I had no idea this was going on at all.
The Blue Room After a lengthy restoration, The Roosevelt, among New Orleans' oldest and most storied landmarks, is set to return June 25, 2009. A look behind the gilded doors.
The ceremony looked like the setup to any number of old jokes told in the Blue Room: a hotelier, a businessman, scores of tipplers and a priest. The giddy crowd spilled onto Baronne Street, holding up traffic, clinking plastic glasses of bubbly and dancing to the Rebirth Brass Band, performing nearby beneath a large, unlit marquee.
Amid the late-May revelry, hotelier Tod Chambers stood at a raised podium and saluted the players. "Their name is appropriate for tonight's celebration," Chambers began, alluding to the rebirth of an "era of greatness." He welcomed Kurt Weigle, president and CEO of the Downtown Development District, and Father Stephen Sauer, pastor of the neighboring Immaculate Conception Jesuit Church. (In a savvy public-relations decision, none of the drinkers were invited onstage.)
With the pomp finished, it was time for the punch line. "So, what do you think, should we test it out?" Chambers teased his audience. They whooped in approval. He walked to the edge of the stage, where a lever awaited him. "I hope this works," he muttered, only partly for effect, and pulled the switch.
It didn't. Some members of the crowd let out nervous laughter; others began to murmur. Chambers, along with the rest of the gathering, looked skyward, hopeful or perhaps saying a prayer of his own. And after a few anxious moments, for the first time in almost half a century, the sign capitulated, flashing a lone word, sacrosanct in Crescent City lore, above the heads of the hotelier, the businessman, the tipplers and the priest:
"ROOSEVELT."
"When a priest comes to bless a hotel, we need to thank (developer) Sam (Friedman), too," Ann Tuennerman says two weeks later, ducking into one of the Roosevelt's labyrinthine, back-of-the-house hallways. She laughs, adding, "I went to an opening of a Popeyes one time, and they had a priest there. Classic New Orleans."
It's now the first day of June and Tuennerman, who is helping the hotel with its press and whose Tales of the Cocktail festival will commence here in early July, is part of an advance tour led by Chambers, a Hilton New Orleans transplant. Sales tours, like the ballyhooed sign lighting, are just another part of the process for the Roosevelt's new general manager. On June 25, 22 months after Friedman's Natchitoches-based Dimension Development Company purchased it for $17 million, the latest addition to the Hilton's Waldorf Astoria Collection will open its gilded doors to guests for the first time in nearly four years.
Some would say 44 years. The landmark property — formerly known as the Fairmont (1965-2005), the Fairmont-Roosevelt (for a brief spell in the mid-'60s) and, back when French Quarter residents actually conversed in French, the Grunewald (1893-1923) — has sat shuttered since August 2005, when floodwaters filled its basement, wrecking the 14-story building's mechanical and electrical infrastructures.
"We have the largest economic renovation in New Orleans post-Katrina," Chambers says, leading the group up a narrow stairwell. "I think it's the largest private investment in the city since Katrina — $145 million. Six-hundred-something jobs."
More later.
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There's nothing quite like the parties they used to throw in the Blue Room. If those walls could talk!
ReplyDeleteI had read somewhere that the Christmas decorations this past year were still plentiful but more sophisticated. This year I hope I get to see them.