Early in 1989, during a stay at Manhattan's Algonquin on West 44th Street, I was encouraged by friends to go and hear a brilliant young jazz pianist who happened to be in residence in the hotel's famed Oak Room. For one reason or another I didn't get around to buying a ticket. The film director Rob Reiner did make the time, however, and a little later Harry Connick Jnr was signed up to perform the score for the movie When Harry Met Sally.
It is more than a little fitting that what amounts to an audition for one of the most quintessential New York films of the last two decades should have taken place at the Algonquin, one of the most quintessential New York hotels. There are grander hotels in the city. There are hotels serving more intricate and developed food. There are certainly hipper hotels. (The Algonquin, now a protected landmark, most resolutely does not do hip.) But there is none which better personifies the history of the town and its literary and showbusiness connections.
'There's a real benefit to not having to reinvent yourself every three or four years,' says Geoffrey Mills, the current general manager. 'The trendy, fashionable market can be very fickle.' Whereas his market is very loyal. There are guests who have been coming here for 40 years and employees who have been working at the Algonquin for longer. 'The average length of service is 17 years,' Mills says.. 'We've got a barman who's 85 and can still mix two drinks at once. He's only been here 32 years, though. There's another guy who's about to bust 50 years.'
Its claims to fame are many. John F. Kennedy used to stay at the Algonquin on his trips to New York. William Faulkner wrote his Nobel prize acceptance speech here. Lerner and Loewe wrote My Fair Lady in Loewe's suite. Authors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Maya Angelou have stayed here. Orson Welles homeymooned here and Liza Minelli and Hillary Clinton are frequent visitors. But its reputation was secured by what became known as the Algonquin Round Table. For the better part of a decade from 1919 a group of young writers, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott and, of course, Dorothy Parker, took up residence every lunchtime in the hotel's Rose Room (now the Round Table Room) at the back of the wood-lined lobby and tried to outwit each other. (Top Dorothy Parker line? Challenged to come up with a smart gag using the word 'horticulture' she replied 'You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think'.)
Frank Case, the legendary manager and then owner of the hotel, knew that most of them were impoverished but tolerated their small spend because they would be good for business. In 1925, when the New Yorker magazine was created over meals at the hotel, many of the Round Table crew went to write for it. The literary associations remain; readings and talks are now held at the Algonquin and the lobby is still a favoured haunt for publishers and their authors.
Mills accepts, though, that such associations can be a burden. 'We do battle our heritage at times,' he says. 'I think we've done better with it in the past few years than previously.' He admits that in the Eighties (before his time) the whole hotel was resting on that history and had become desperately run down. A major renovation in 1997 dealt with that problem although it probably says a lot about what the hotel was like before that they made much of the fact that each room now had new mattresses. Most hotels change their mattresses once every year or two. Part of the Algonquin's rejuvenation in the latter part of its life is down to the cabaret in the Oak Room. In the 1930s there was a supper club at the hotel and the likes of John Barrymore and Greta Garbo were regulars (until Garbo's fondness for Hitler took her off the bill). The supper club closed down at the beginning of the war. In 1980 it reopened with what was meant to be a two-week residency by the cabaret artist Michael Feinstein. He stayed for four months. Since then, as well as Connick, the Algonquin has also been the launch pad for Diana Krall and has become a firm fixture of Manhattan life.
As to the food it is like the décor: very traditional, very American. In the Blue Bar (where, at one time, even the barman was a novelist) it's all turkey club sandwiches and corned beef on rye, chef's salad and cheesecake.The Oak Room and Round Table Room feature grander but still sturdy dishes like braised beef short ribs and shrimp, scallop and mussel stew. They are surrounded by some of the smartest, most cutting edge restaurants in town but, as Mills puts it, 'Food-wise we plough our own furrow'. That's what people want. 'After September 11 our lobby became very busy indeed,' says Barbara McGurn, who helps run the Oak Room and who first came to the Algonquin for hot chocolate as a child in 1942. 'It seemed people found it a comforting place to be.' That may well be so. One morning last December Michael Bloomberg, recently elected the next mayor of the city, came in for breakfast (menu: French toast with crisp bacon, pancakes with maple syrup) with David Dinkins, the previous mayor. A little later Rudy Giuliani, then serving in office, also tried to get a table. He had to leave, disappointed. Three mayors of New York was just one too many, even for the Algonquin.
