1960s Handbook - The Savoy-Plaza Hotel
The 1960s Handbook takes a closer look at the cultural references that appear in each week's episode of Mad Men.
Bookending the southeast corner of Central Park, the Savoy-Plaza was an architectural tour de force rising 33 stories above the ground and housing nearly one thousand rooms. Its masculine, geometric design embodied Art Deco's marriage between man and machine, featuring cubist buttresses, arched entrances, and a Tudoresque slant roof with twin chimneys. In its heyday, the Savoy-Plaza was considered a triumph of 1920s prosperity; it weathered the financial hardships of the Great Depression, and within four years of its completion, was joined by two taller, lither hotel counterparts, the Sherry-Netherlands and The Pierre.
This trio of grand hotels faced fellow Fifth Avenue titans Bergdorf-Goodman and the world-renowned Plaza Hotel, marking a Golden Age for Beaux-Arts architecture that lasted until 1964, when the Savoy was demolished to make way for the controversial General Motors skyscraper, a 50-story tribute that now houses the FAO Schwartz flagship. With the addition of the Apple store's glass cube in recent years, little remains in the collective Manhattan memory of the elegant Savoy-Plaza.
What was the music played by the harpist in the lobby while Don is waiting in the Season 2 Permiere?
Two years after episode one of the second season, the Savoy-Plaza was gone, to be replaced by a fluted slab skyscraper.
List this along with the purchase of many city electric rail transit systems (to sell more diesel-spewing buses) as being among the sins of GM.