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The Pierre is a luxury hotel located at 2 East 61st Street at the intersection of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York City, facing Central Park. The hotel, which was designed by Schultze & Weaver, opened in 1930, and was later acquired by Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces of India. Standing tall,〔 it is located within the Upper East Side Historic District as designated in 1981 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. ==History== Charles Pierre Casalasco left his father's restaurant in Ajaccio, Corsica, where he had started as a busboy,〔Casalasco and the founding of The Pierre follows the account in (Simon 1978), reported on-line at (the City Review ).〕 assumed Charles Pierre as his full professional name, and began work at the Hotel Anglais in Monte Carlo.〔Glamorized history reports his father as owner of the Hotel Anglais, and Charles Pierre as rubbing shoulders with the Russian grand dukes and European royalty who patronized his father's hotel.〕 Pierre went on to study haute cuisine in Paris, and he later traveled to London where he met the American restaurateur, Louis Sherry, who offered Pierre a position. After Pierre arrived in New York as a 25-year-old immigrant, he made his first mark as first assistant at Sherry's Restaurant and became professionally acquainted with members of the Social Register, as well as newer millionaires like J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts. After nine years at Sherry's,〔"Smart women were beginning to smoke in public rooms. Mr. Sherry forbade it in his restaurant, an irritating, old-fashioned prohibition, Pierre thought, and, after flights of heated words he left." (Simon 1978).〕 Pierre left, first for the Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue at Forty-sixth Street, then opening his own restaurant on Forty-fifth Street immediately west of Fifth Avenue, and finally at Pierre's on Park at 230 Park Avenue. At the height of his success, dissatisfied with the increasing democratization of public manners, Pierre sold his restaurant and entered a joint venture with a group of Wall Street financiers, "among them Otto H. Kahn, Finley J. Shepherd (who had married Helen Gould), Edward F. Hutton, Walter P. Chrysler, and Robert Livingston Gerry, Sr. (the son of Elbridge Thomas Gerry, lawyer, philanthropist and grandson of Elbridge Gerry, the inventor of 'Gerrymandering')".〔Simon 1978.〕 The 714-room Pierre Hotel that rose forty-one stories on the site of the Gerry mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 61st Street allowed for unrestricted views of Central Park. It cost $15 million (approximately $ million in ) to build and opened to grand fanfare in October 1930. 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.〔Schultze, Leonard, S. Fullerton Weaver, Marianne Lamonaca, and Jonathan Mogul. Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age: the Architecture of Schultze & Weaver. Miami Beach: Wolfsonian-Florida International University, 2005.〕 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. New York society turned out to attend the gala dinner that marked the opening of The Pierre; it was prepared by Auguste Escoffier, "the father of French chefs", who served as a guest chef at The Pierre in its early years. As markets continued to collapse during the Great Depression, The Pierre went into bankruptcy in 1932. The oilman, J. Paul Getty, bought it for about $2.5 million in 1938 (approximately $ million in ) and subsequently sold many cooperative apartments in the building. Beginning in 1948, New York City's ABC television and FM radio station (then called WJZ-TV Channel 7 and WJZ-FM 95.5, now WABC-TV and WPLJ) broadcast from a tower atop the Pierre, until moving to the Empire State Building a few years later. The Pierre was the scene of the Pierre Hotel Robbery in 1972. Today, the hotel contains 189 guest accommodations, including forty suites, and thirteen grand suites. Dining options in the hotel include the restaurant ''Sirio'' located off Fifth Avenue and the 2E Lounge off the Main Lobby of the hotel. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Pierre」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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