A "captivating portrait" (The Wall Street Journal), both
"poignant and intriguing" (The New Republic): from award-winning
author Paulina Bren comes the remarkable history of New York's most
famous residential hotel and the women who stayed there, including Grace
Kelly, Sylvia Plath, and Joan Didion.
Welcome to New York's legendary hotel for women, the Barbizon.
Liberated after WWI from home and hearth, women flocked to New York City
during the Roaring Twenties. But even as women's residential hotels
became the fashion, the Barbizon stood out; it was designed for young
women with artistic aspirations, and included soaring art studios and
soundproofed practice rooms. More importantly still, with no men allowed
beyond the lobby, the Barbizon signaled respectability, a place where a
young woman of a certain class could feel at home.
But as the stock market crashed and the Great Depression set in, the
clientele changed, though women's ambitions did not; the Barbizon Hotel
became the go-to destination for any young American woman with a dream
to be something more. While Sylvia Plath most famously fictionalized her
time there in The Bell Jar, the Barbizon was also where Titanic
survivor Molly Brown sang her last aria; where Grace Kelly danced
topless in the hallways; where Joan Didion got her first taste of
Manhattan; and where both Ali MacGraw and Jaclyn Smith found their
calling as actresses. Students of the prestigious Katharine Gibbs
Secretarial School had three floors to themselves, Eileen Ford used the
hotel as a guest house for her youngest models, and Mademoiselle
magazine boarded its summer interns there, including a young designer
named Betsey Johnson.
The first ever history of this extraordinary hotel, and of the women who
arrived in New York City alone from "elsewhere" with a suitcase and a
dream, The Barbizon offers readers a multilayered history of New York
City in the 20th century, and of the generations of American women torn
between their desire for independence and their looming social
expiration date. By providing women a room of their own, the Barbizon
was the hotel that set them free.
