The Hotel Indestructible

The massive building on the east side of 7th Avenue between 50th and 51st turns 80 next year, but don't expect any birthday celebrations. For most New Yorkers, the boxy Spanish Renaissance structure barely registers, lost amidst sleek newcomers like Lehman Brothers' headquarters a block away. But the Hotel Taft, as this building was once known, has a long history that reflects all the frenzy of 20th-century Manhattan. When it opened as the Manger in November 1926 (on the site of a railway-car barn), it was the third-largest hotel in the city, with 20 stories, 1750 rooms and a special "key chute" on each floor that whisked lost items straight to the lobby desk.

Despite efforts to bring good tidings to the hotel with a special religious ceremony that December (during which 1250 Bibles were presented in the lobby), much of the Taft's life was marked by tragedy. During construction, a steel mast crushed and killed a workman, 55-year-old Anthony La Stella, and on May 26, 1933, country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers died of tuberculosis in his hotel room. Just 35, he had made his final recordings the previous night in an attempt to raise money for medical bills. The hotel witnessed further loss in 1954, when the 66-year-old widow of a naval hero jumped to her death from the seventh floor, and its later years were hampered by missed mortgage payments and management problems.

But there were good times, too-especially when Vincent Lopez led his famous big band in the hotel's Grill Room beginning in the 1940s. The Taft also acted as gateway to the famous Roxy Theatre, built at the same time as the hotel and considered one of the most opulent movie palaces of the Roaring Twenties, with nearly 6000 seats, a stage turntable for live shows and its own hospital and nursery. The lobby of the Roxy was housed in the Taft's southeast corner, where a TGIF restaurant sits today. Although the theater has acquired a mythic reputation (sparked by a photo of silent-film queen Gloria Swanson standing amidst its ruins in 1960), the Taft site provides the only physical vestige of its existence.

For much of its history, the Taft was a low-priced and dependable tourist hotel (much like today's Edison), a place where parents from Minnesota could feel secure sending their 18-year-olds for a long weekend. It closed in 1984 and now operates on seven floors as the Michelangelo Hotel, with condos above. James Jolis, the hotel's knowledgeable concierge, keeps a file of interesting clippings on the building's history, including a bill from 1952 with a room charge of $8.75 plus tax-a far cry from the Michelangelo's current rates, which start at $295 a night. Having survived by adapting to the new real estate market, the former Taft remains proud and indestructible, a true octogenarian New Yorker.