Chronicle No. 29 · Incidents

The Family Feud That Built a Hotel, and a Corridor Ready to Be Bricked Up

Two Astors, two rival hotels on Fifth Avenue, and a truce written so either side could wall the other off.

William Waldorf Astor could not stand living beside his aunt, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the reigning arbiter of New York society, with whom he had quarrelled over which of them had the right to be called Mrs Astor.

His answer was drastic. He pulled down the family mansion at Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street and put a hotel in its place. The thirteen-storey Waldorf, designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, opened on 13 March 1893, overshadowing his aunt's house next door. She moved uptown.

Her son, John Jacob Astor IV, then built the Astoria on the adjoining corner at 34th Street, taller and grander, by the same architect. It opened on 1 November 1897.

Then the interesting thing happened. Instead of ruining each other, the cousins joined the two buildings with a marble corridor, which New Yorkers promptly nicknamed Peacock Alley for the people who came simply to walk it. The truce was written down, and it included a clause allowing the connecting corridors to be bricked up if the peace failed.

Under the founding proprietor George Boldt, whose motto was that the guest is always right, and the maitre d'hotel Oscar Tschirky, the combined Waldorf-Astoria set the pattern for the American grand hotel: public rooms as theatre, a dining room that made news, and staff who knew names.

The wall was never built. The hotels ran as one until the site was cleared in 1929 for the Empire State Building, and the name moved to Park Avenue.

Two people who disliked each other still managed to open a door between them. Most partnerships in this industry are exactly that.

“The guest is always right”

Lesson: Rivals can share a corridor if the terms are honest about how it might end; what guests remember is the corridor, not the clause.