I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90 degree heat, halfway down an air shaft in a midtown hotel.

No air moves in and out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by the emanations from the immediate surroundings.

I am eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed,

five blocks from the publisher's office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max Eastman on the nose.

Four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle.

34 blocks from the street where Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska and 13 blocks from where Harry Shaw shot Samford White

and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number

of exalted and memorable characters sat in. Some of them on hot breathless afternoons,

lonely and private and full of their own emanations from without. Those words are from the opening paragraphs of a famous essay written in 1948 by Elwyn Brooks White, E.B. White, best known for books like Stuart Little

and Charlotte's Web. The essay is called Here is New York, which he wrote, as he mentions, from a stultifying hotel room.

It was the Algonquin Hotel.

This is another time in New York, another era, pre-air conditioning, certainly, when hotel rooms

in Midtown Manhattan were actually affordable and a place like the Algonquin could have its own particular personality and clientele.

Today the Algonquin still stands where it's always been a 44th Street right off of 6th, but it's changed ownership

so many times, and this is true of all of Gotham's greatest hotels still with us,

the Plaza, the St. Regis, Shuri Netherlands, and and maybe greatest of them all, the Waldorf Astoria.

These cultural landmarks of luxury have always been the core of the Big Apple, setting the bar

for an urban experience unlike any other anywhere in the world.

It's New York. It's hotel history and I love it.

So I phoned up my friend and colleague Anthony Melchiori to help me tell the stories.

Many know Anthony as the meticulous and dis- Anthony Melchiori to help me tell the stories.

Many know Anthony as the meticulous and discriminating

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