"If you couldn't get into the Chelsea Hotel, you came here (Gramercy Park Hotel)," so said British filmmaker, Simon Monjack, in a Jan 23, 2005 interview in the NYT. Is that what happened to Ian Schrager? He couldn't buy the Chelsea so he bought the Gramercy Park. In a recent interview with the London Financial Times, Schrager revealed that the Chelsea is on his radar:
AB: How concerned are you about preserving the legacy of the original Gramercy Park Hotel?
IS: It's one of those three sister hotels in New York that everyone thinks they own a piece of - the Plaza, the Chelsea and the Gramercy Park. It will still have the same DNA but we didn't want to look back in the past; we wanted to look forward. When we took it over it was a dump. (6/25/05 LFT)
Now that the work is almost finished at the Gramercy, has Ian regrouped in an effort to purchase the Last Outpost of Bohemia? Over my dead body, Stanly Bard replies, in The New York Post. "Someday when I'm gone, they [the investors] can sell it," he told The Post.
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