Even Eloise Got Evicted From The Plaza

Yesterday after work I went over to the Jefferson Hotel, which is closing and liquidating. (It was technically invitation only but anyone can go today from 10-7.) Everything's for sale, right down to the hangers and bathrobes. It was fairly quiet when I was there, giving me the chance to poke around in rooms alone. It was a somewhat maudlin and eerie stroll. Sunlight filtered into empty rooms. Stately lodgings had become disheveled, priced-to-go sums of their parts. For two years, when daydreaming, I've looked from my office window, down the street, at one particular balconied room of this hotel. Yesterday, I found my way to that room and stared out the window back at my own office nearby. The room was enormous and had once been grand, just as I'd imagined it. But now the rich wood furniture was covered with a fine coat of dust. I was simultaneously intrigued and a little bummed out to stand inside it.

Waiting for one of the tiny elevator cars that would carry me back down to the ornate and quickly-being-dismantled lobby, I chatted with a nun in full-length habit. Tired from winding her way through the maze of rooms on the eighth floor, she perched on a brocade-seated chair, resting her arm against a pile of several matching ones. "The chairs around the table in our meeting room are so rickety," she told me. "These will be nice." I liked the idea of the chairs moving from a place where rooms once cost $350 a night to providing a nice place for the sisters to sit.