The Suite Life. Christopher HeardЧитать онлайн книгу.
began, the hotel took on a whole new atmosphere and design. It’s called Auberge Saint-Antoine. My friend and ace travel public relations person Ann Layton of Siren Communications introduced me to this hotel. She arranged for me to spend some time in the place and meet Llewellyn Price, its owner.
The story of this multi-faceted hotel is quite interesting. It began when the Price family (of the Abitibi-Price pulp and paper empire) bought a collection of rundown, abandoned warehouses, an apartment house, and a parking lot on prime property facing the St. Lawrence River. In 1992 they converted part of the collection of buildings into a small inn called Auberge Saint-Antoine. It had only 23 comfortable rooms then. In 1995 the second phase of the hotel, Maison Hunt, opened. It was the old apartment house restored to reflect its 18th-century heritage. Now the auberge had eight more suites, but these new ones were each completely unique and had a specific historical theme reflected in their decor. A third phase was planned that involved digging up the parking lot and erecting an ultra-slick, hip boutique hotel, but because of the location’s historical significance, the Quebec government stepped in.
“It was suggested to us that we do a bit of an archaeological dig, a survey, beforehand to determine if there wasn’t something of historical value there,” Price told me. “Of course, we could only benefit by that, too, so we entered into a partnership with the city, the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec, and the Council of Monuments and Historical Sites of Quebec, and brought in experts from Laval University to begin the dig.”
That dig turned up a virtual treasure trove of museum-quality pieces large and small and revealed a 17th-century cannon battery complete with intact walls and cannons as well as a wealth of dishes, pottery, utensils, and weapons. “We decided to build the 63-room modern boutique hotel on the site,” Price said, “but make everything that was discovered part of the hotel. The walls and cannons are perfectly preserved as part of the lobby, and the artifacts we found are displayed in the hallways under glass, so the hotel is a modern hotel and a museum of the history of the very site it was built on, going back 300 or more years.”
While Auberge Saint-Antoine is a lovely hotel, and I enjoyed every minute of my several visits there, the museum-like aspect is sometimes a bit distracting. In the comfortable suites, artifacts are displayed under glass on end tables, in the coffee tables, the desk, and the walls outside doors. It gives the place a reverential sort of vibe, so much so that you don’t dare put a soft drink can anywhere. Still, the boldness of creating a slick, ultra-modern hotel with a historical theme running through every corner is admirable.
Quebec City’s Auberge Saint-Antoine weds history to modern convenience to create a unique boutique hotel.
˜ ˜ ˜
Perhaps one of the most endearing and lovable characters from film and literature who brings together hotel living and the beauty of old-world hotels is Eloise, the perennial six-year-old girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The Plaza (now owned by Fairmont) is to New York City what the Royal York is to Toronto — a beacon, a place of history, grace, and class that’s larger than its already immense iconic reputation. The first time I had the opportunity to visit New York I wanted to go to the Plaza and stroll through its grand lobby. When I did so, one of the first things I saw was the portrait of Eloise painted by illustrator Hilary Knight. My notions of the Plaza were formed by Eloise and by Neil Simon’s play and film Plaza Suite, and here I was standing in, as Archie Bunker once said, “the middle of their midst.”
This history of the Plaza and the Royal York has a lot of similarities, which probably explains why the hotels have, in some respects, similar appearances and characteristics. The Plaza is located in a prime Manhattan location: Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. It was designed by the American architect Henry Janey Hardenbergh to be “the greatest hotel in the world.” The Plaza opened on October 1, 1907, and was built on the site of another hotel called the Plaza, which was knocked down to be replaced by the current, grander building. No expense was spared to erect this 19-storey French Renaissance château-like structure complete with marble lobbies, solid mahogany doors, 1,650 crystal chandeliers, Swiss organdy curtains, linens manufactured privately for the exclusive use of guests, and gold-encrusted china.
In the books by New York show business figure Kay Thompson, Eloise lives in a suite on the “tippy-top floor” of the Plaza. Tall and slender with a deep, breathy voice, Thompson first invented her make-believe character in 1948 when she arrived late for a nightclub performance. The nightclub owner reputedly shouted at her, “Who do you think you are?”
Thompson answered in a little girl voice, “I am Eloise!” and proceeded to lay the blame for her tardiness on her little girl alter ego. Over the next few years, the singer/dancer incorporated the precocious Eloise into her stage act. In 1954 Thompson’s friends encouraged her to put Eloise on paper in a children’s book. Thompson was introduced to illustrator Hilary Knight, whom it was thought could bring Eloise to life. Over Christmas of that year, Knight sent Thompson a Christmas card with her first impression of what Eloise would look like riding in a sleigh with Santa Claus. Thompson glanced at the picture and said, “It was immediate recognition on my part. There she was. In person.”
Knight moved into the Plaza with Thompson, who had been living there for years, to work on the first book. While the collaborators engaged in “writing, editing, laughing, outlining, cutting, pasting, laughing again, reading out loud, laughing some more,” it seemed natural to have Eloise live in the Plaza. The idea flowered fully for Thompson when she thought of Liza Minnelli, her own goddaughter, who was often left in the company and care of hotel staffers while mother Judy Garland was on the set of a film or singing in a club or recording an album. Now everything fitted together like a Swiss watch. Eloise would show up at weddings she wasn’t invited to, and she would crash meetings and parties and interrupt all sorts of different people in the hotel. The inaugural book, Eloise, was published on November 28, 1955, and was so successful that offers to write more installments were immediate, as were requests to record versions of the stories, do product endorsements, and authorize dramatizations of Eloise’s life. Thompson and Knight then set up Eloise Ltd., with the Plaza, of course, as their headquarters.
In 1956 Thompson allowed the TV anthology series Playhouse 90 to do a show adapted from her book. It was billed as “Eloise — based on the hilarious bestselling story about the sprightly six-year-old girl who runs — and often runs ragged — the lives of the celebrated guests and devoted employees of a distinguished New York hotel.” But the writer who penned the teleplay strayed wildly from the basic innocence and good nature of the character and created a drama involving Eloise being caught in the middle of her parents’ divorce and the hotel being filled with intrigue and scoundrels. The reviews of the show were terrible, and people who loved the books completely rejected this dramatization. Thompson was so angry about what had been done to her book that she vowed never again to allow her character to be dramatized in another medium.
New York City’s fabled Plaza Hotel is best known as the home of the delightful but fictional Eloise.
(Courtesy Fairmont Hotels & Resorts)
Later in the 1950s three more Eloise books were published, and Thompson became a celebrity mainstay at the Plaza where she organized huge tea parties for fans and entertained them with Eloise stories. In 1958 she helped create the children’s menu at the Plaza that features such dishes as “Teeny Weenies” and “Eggs Eloise.” For a number of years there was a special room at the Plaza named the Eloise Room. It was a large sitting room where guests could relax and mingle. There was also, for a while, an ice-cream parlour in the Plaza called the Eloise.
By 1989 the Eloise books had been in constant print for decades and were huge bestsellers. At the Plaza a new owner, Donald Trump, wanted to use the image of Eloise in an advertising campaign for the hotel. Hilary Knight was brought in to design special children’s suites in the hotel that featured murals on the walls commemorating the adventures of Eloise. She was also asked to design children’s menus with Eloise drawings on them. But Thompson didn’t like Trump