Hotel Pierre, New York

Hotel Pierre, New York - Schultze and Weaver,  Architects
 Lloyd Morgan, Renderer - 1928

Hotel Pierre, New York - Schultze and Weaver,  Architects
 Chester B. Price, Renderer - 1929

Hotel Pierre, New York - Schultze and Weaver,  Architects
 

Hotel Pierre, New York - Schultze and Weaver,  Architects 

   The Pierre is a luxury hotel located in Manhattan, facing Central Park, opened in 1930, as of 2013 it is owned by Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces of India. The original 714-room Pierre that rose forty-two stories on the site of the Gerry mansion allows for unrestricted views of Central Park. The hotel was designed by the New York firm of Schultze and Weaver as a skyscraper that rises in a blond-brick shaft from a limestone-fronted Louis XVI base.

  Its topmost floors render it an easily-recognizable landmark on the New York skyline; they are modeled after Mansart's Royal Chapel at Versailles, a system of Corinthian pilasters and arch-headed windows, with octagonal ends, under a tall, slanted, copper roof that is pierced with bronze-finished bull's-eye dormers. The Pierre went into bankruptcy in 1932, but was purchased by oilman J. Paul Getty in 1938 and subsequently sold many cooperative apartments in the building. In 2013, the hotel contains 189 guest accommodations, including forty suites, and thirteen grand suites. ***New York Times subscribers can read about the purchase HERE***

Detail of Ballroom Ceiling, Hotel Pierre, New York - Schultze and Weaver,  Architects

Make your reservations HERE. Additional photos and history  also to be found.  Watch a lecture from the Whitehall Lecture Series pertaining to the firm.  Book - Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: The Architecture of Schultze and Weaver. Another review HERE.  MORE.

  S. Fullerton Weaver, known as Major Weaver, he was trained as a civil engineer, and during the 1910s he developed Park Avenue apartment buildings on land leased from the New York Central Railroad near Grand Central Station. Notable among these were the 400 Park Avenue Building (1914-1915) and the 420-430 Park Avenue Apartments (1916). He built up enough wealth to buy the Park Lane Apartment Hotel. Weaver's high-profile development activities enabled him to become a member of the New York Real Estate Board of Governors. His partnership with Leonard Schultze occurred after his solo career in real estate, during which he had made many social connections on the Eastern Seaboard, relationships that would build the Schultze and Weaver client list. Other connections came from the many social, sport and country clubs to which belonged, including the Westide Tennis Club, University of Pennsylvania, the Lotus, Oakland Golf, Maidstone, and Turf and Field Clubs. (In 1929, he also belonged to Midwick Club of Pasadena, CA, and the elite Jonathan Club of Los Angeles, CA.) After World War I, he was also active in veterans' groups, particularly the Military Order of Naval and Army Officers of the World War, of which he was a Governor. SOURCE

 Leonard Schultze was born in Chicago and educated at the City College of New York, for 20 years worked with the firm of Warren & Wetmore, during which time he worked on New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. He joined partnership with S. Fullerton Weaver in 1921, creating a multidisciplinary firm, Schultze and Weaver, focusing on real estate, architecture, and engineering. A major early commission, John McEntee Bownman’s Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, led to work for many other Biltmore properties across the country. Designed in a Spanish-Colonial Renaissance style, the hotel was meant as a grand icon, a landmark of luxury, signifying Los Angeles’ arrival as a major American city. Schultze and Weaver also designed New York City’s opulent Waldorf-Astoria. The architectural firm was well-known nationwide for its design of large apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, and clubs as well as office buildings, including the New York headquarters of the J.C. Penney Company. As the firm evolved into Schultze & Associates, Schultze was instrumental in the design a of number of large-scale residential developments, including Parkfairfax in Virginia with Clarke & Rapuano, Park La Brea in Los Angeles and, most notably, Parkmerced in San Francisco with Thomas Church, which the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company developed in response to U.S. housing shortages after World War II. SOURCE