Plaza Hotel

The Plaza Hotel in New York City is a landmark 19-story hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South in Manhattan, currently closed and undergoing renovations. Its main entrance faces the southern portion of Grand Army Plaza— commemorating the Army of the Union in the Civil War. Grand Army Plaza is in two sections, bisected by Central Park South. The section in front of the Plaza Hotel is centered by the Pulitzer Fountain, of Abundance by Karl Bitter, funded by the will of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer: the statue in the fountain is actually Pomona, Roman goddess of fruits and nuts. The north side of Grand Army Plaza, a cutout from Central Park, has the glorious Augustus Saint-Gaudens part-gilded bronze equestrian statue of General Sherman. Grand Army Plaza provided the original main entrance to the carriage drives of Central Park.

External links and references

• The Plaza Hotel, from the Fairmont Hotels and Resorts website
• National Historic Landmark listing
• The Plaza Hotel, from the website of a former New York Post architecture critic
• The Plaza: How it was Sold, a December 2004 article from a NYC real estate website
• The Plaza Says It'll Be History After April 30, a March 2005 New York Times article (registration required)
• The Plaza Lives! - an oral history of the Plaza Hotel that appeared in New York magazine in May 2005.