The Plaza, A Fairmont Hotel

I checked in on a Tuesday afternoon and there were more people photographing the lobby than staying in it. That’s not a complaint, exactly — it’s just the first thing you should know about the plaza before you hand over your credit card. This is a hotel and a landmark and a movie set and a gift shop all operating out of the same building at the same time, and you are paying for all four whether you wanted them or not.

The Plaza opened on October 1, 1907, which means it has been doing this — being famous, being photographed, being the backdrop for other people’s important moments — for well over a century, longer than almost anything else on this list. It has outlived the family that built it, survived a stint as part-condominium, and somehow still gets treated like the single most important hotel address in America. Mostly correctly.

I stayed three nights in a Fifth Avenue-facing room, had tea in the Palm Court out of pure journalistic obligation, and left with a strong opinion about whether the myth holds up. Short version: it mostly does, at a price that will make you understand why so much of the mythology involves other people’s money.

---

📍 Location	768 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, New York, USA
💰 Price range	~$1,200/€1,100/£950 per night, often higher
⭐ Best for	History obsessives, special occasions, anyone who wants to sleep where Gatsby lost his composure
⏱️ Sweet spot	Late fall (Central Park foliage, holiday windows going up) or January (post-holiday rate dip)
🚫 Skip if	You want a quiet, private, unphotographed lobby experience
📖 Book	The Plaza on Booking.com

Check availability and current rates →

---

The History Nobody Tells You

Henry Janeway Hardenbergh designed the Plaza, and if the name sounds familiar it’s because he also designed the Dakota — the apartment building where John Lennon would later live and die, a few blocks north across the same park. Hardenbergh had a habit of building New York landmarks that outgrew their own architecture and became something closer to institutions. The Plaza was financed through a syndicate connected to the Astor family and developer Bernard Beinecke, which tells you the money behind this building was never modest money. It opened October 1, 1907, in French Renaissance château style, looking like it had been airlifted from the Loire Valley and set down at Central Park South out of spite toward every other hotel in Manhattan.

The building earned National Historic Landmark status in 1986, and by then it had already collected more literary and cultural weight than most cities manage in their entire histories. F. Scott Fitzgerald put the Plaza at the emotional center of “The Great Gatsby” — the confrontation scene between Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom happens in a suite here, on the hottest day of the summer, which is the whole reason the scene works as well as it does. Fitzgerald and Zelda reportedly jumped into the fountain outside the hotel at some point during their own chaotic New York years, which feels less like a rumor and more like a documented character trait.

In February 1964, the Beatles stayed here during their first trip to the United States, in town for The Ed Sullivan Show, and the crowd of screaming fans outside got large enough that it’s still referenced as one of the early data points proving Beatlemania was a genuine phenomenon and not a marketing exercise. Two years later, in November 1966, Truman Capote hosted his Black and White Ball in the Grand Ballroom — widely considered the most famous party of the 20th century, guest list assembled with the precision of a state dinner, and still the reference point every “party of the century” story gets measured against.

And then there’s Eloise. Kay Thompson’s books, starting in 1955, are about a six-year-old who lives at the Plaza and terrorizes the staff with total impunity, and the hotel leaned into it hard enough that there’s now an Eloise Suite and a portrait of her in the lobby that visiting kids treat with the reverence usually reserved for actual royalty. Add in “Home Alone 2,” filmed here in 1992 during Donald Trump’s ownership of the building (1988–1995, cameo included), and you’ve got a hotel that has been culturally relevant in five different decades for five completely unrelated reasons.

Book the hotel that shows up in everyone else’s story →

The Rooms — Real Talk

Here’s the thing about the Plaza’s rooms that the marketing photos don’t quite prepare you for: a 2005–2008 renovation by the El-Ad Group converted a significant chunk of the building into private condominiums, which means the hotel you’re booking is a smaller, denser operation than the building’s footprint suggests — roughly 282 rooms and suites left to actually rent, wrapped around the same ballrooms and public rooms that have always been there.

What that buys you is a room that’s been renovated on a genuinely modern timeline, not a museum piece pretending to have working plumbing. What it costs you is a sense that the hotel is squeezed into a building that also has full-time residents, which occasionally shows up as slightly more traffic and slightly less “grand hotel hush” than you’d expect for the price.

Pricing swings enormously by date and demand — I saw a standard room price out at roughly $1,750 a night for a random weeknight in September, and that’s not even close to the ceiling.

Room Type	Price/night	Best for
Deluxe Room	~$1,000/€920/£790	Off-peak dates, first-timers testing the myth
Fifth Avenue View Room	~$1,800/€1,650/£1,420	The window is doing half the work of the price tag
Park View Suite	~$3,500/€3,220/£2,765	Anniversaries, honeymoons, justified extravagance
Eloise Suite	~$5,500+/€5,060+/£4,350+	Families with a six-year-old who’s read the books

The honest note: at these prices, the room itself needs to be extraordinary, and it’s very good but not otherworldly. You are paying at least as much for the address and the elevator doors as you are for the thread count.

See what’s actually available for your dates →

Food & Drinks

The Palm Court is the reason half the tourists in the lobby are there at all — afternoon tea under the stained-glass ceiling, running roughly $85–$95 per person, and it books out weeks ahead for a reason. It’s a genuinely good tea service, and it’s also a performance you’re paying to be part of, which is fine as long as you know that going in.

The Oak Room and Oak Bar are the more adult version of the same idea: dark wood, old New York energy, a bar that’s been serving people who wanted to feel important since well before your grandparents were born. A classic cocktail here runs $28–$32, which is steep until you remember you’re drinking it in a room that predates the Empire State Building.

• Afternoon tea, Palm Court: ~$90/€83/£71 per person, book ahead
• Cocktails, Oak Bar: ~$30/€28/£24, worth one night’s splurge
• Breakfast, in-room or at Todd English Food Hall in the basement: more reasonable than you’d expect
• Skip: ordering a full dinner from room service unless the per-plate markup doesn’t bother you
• Signature move: get one drink at the Oak Bar and one tea sitting, and call it even — you don’t need to eat every meal in the building

Things I Noticed That Most Reviews Miss

The lobby is not really “your” lobby. Because the building includes condominiums and because the Plaza is a tourist landmark in its own right, the ground floor sees a constant churn of people who aren’t staying there — camera phones out, kids in Eloise dresses, tour groups pausing near the fountain. Budget for that psychologically before you arrive.

The Eloise portrait draws a small, permanent crowd. If you’re traveling with a kid who has read the books, watching them meet that painting is worth more than most of the paid experiences in the hotel.

Housekeeping and front-desk staff know the history cold. Ask someone about the Black and White Ball or the Gatsby suite and you’ll get a real answer, not a script. This is a building where the staff seem to genuinely enjoy the trivia.

The Fifth Avenue rooms let you watch the horse carriages line up at dawn, before Central Park fills in, which is a quieter and stranger version of the postcard than the one you’ll see at 2pm.

The gift shop takes Eloise merchandising more seriously than you’d expect from a National Historic Landmark, and it’s more charming than cynical once you’re standing in it.

The Catch

The price is the price. This isn’t a hotel with a hidden budget tier — even the “cheap” nights are a four-figure decision, and suites move into territory most people reserve for a car payment.

The lobby never really belongs to guests. Between tour groups, wedding parties, and people just there to see the building, you’ll share the ground floor with a lot of non-guests, constantly.

The condo conversion changes the feel. Knowing that part of the building is private residences rather than hotel rooms takes some of the shine off the “grand hotel” fantasy — it reads a little more like a luxury apartment building with a very famous lobby.

Some of the magic is the idea, not the room. If you strip away Gatsby, the Beatles, and Eloise, you’re left with a very good, very expensive Midtown hotel. The history is doing real work in justifying the price.

Is It Worth It?

	Worth it?
Literary and history obsessives	✅ This is the whole point
Special-occasion splurges	✅ Anniversaries, proposals, milestone birthdays
Families with young Eloise fans	✅ Worth it once, memorably
Budget or first-time NYC trips	❌ Wrong hotel, wrong math
Travelers wanting quiet and privacy	⚠️ The lobby will test you

Practical Info

• Address: 768 Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, New York, NY 10019
• Check-in/out: 4pm / 12pm
• Parking: Valet only, ~$85/€78/£67 per night
• WiFi: Included, reliable
• Nearest airport: LaGuardia (LGA) or JFK, 25–45 min by car depending on traffic
• Getting there: Taxi or rideshare from either airport; the N/Q/R subway stops within a few blocks
• Languages spoken: English, with multilingual concierge staff
• Pet friendly: Check directly with hotel for current policy

Final Verdict

The Plaza has been famous for longer than almost any other building in this country has been standing, and it has earned that fame honestly — through Fitzgerald, the Beatles, Capote, and a fictional six-year-old who somehow made a National Historic Landmark feel approachable. It is also, unavoidably, one of the most expensive hotel stays you can book, in a lobby you will share with several hundred people who aren’t staying there. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels out the other.

If you can afford it once, do it once. This is a hotel that earns the word “iconic” instead of just wearing it.

📖 Check availability at The Plaza on Booking.com →

Prices run from roughly $1,000 a night for a deluxe room in slower months to $5,000+ for suites during peak demand. Book the Palm Court tea separately and well in advance — it sells out faster than the rooms do.

This page contains affiliate links. If you book through them, this site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.