Eloise Is Losing Her Home: The Iconic Plaza Hotel Is Closing, and New York Is Heartbroken

Eloise is about to lose her home. The Plaza, the Fifth Avenue landmark where Kay Thompson’s precocious six-year-old ran riot, Kevin McCallister checked in alone in Home Alone 2 and Barbra Streisand said goodbye to Robert Redford in The Way We Were, will close in January 2027 for at least four years while its landmark-protected façade is restored. That puts a return in 2031 at the earliest, with no firm reopening date, and takes nearly 120 years of living New York history out of circulation.

There are hotels you book when you visit New York. And there are hotels that made you want to visit New York in the first place.
The Plaza is the latter. Long before most people ever walk through its doors, they already know what’s waiting on the other side. It’s one of the few places where the city’s mythology is still available by reservation: a table for tea, a wedding in the ballroom, a room overlooking the park. You don’t have to have slept at The Plaza to feel that some part of it belongs to you.

Photo Credit: Corey Stovin

What the Restoration Actually Means

According to the hotel, the work centers on repairing and restoring its historic exterior, with preservation requirements, long-term care of the building and the safety of guests, employees and neighbors shaping the plans. The hotel says the project’s complexity and disruption to operations require a full shutdown; further details are still under review.

That distinction matters. This is a major preservation project, not an announced redesign of the rooms or a new concept for the hotel, and four years is a minimum, not a promise.

Designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, The Plaza became a New York City landmark in 1969, and in 2005 its interiors earned their own protection: the Palm Court, Grand Ballroom, Terrace Room, Edwardian Room, Oak Room, Oak Bar and both main entrance lobbies. Protecting the physical landmark, it turns out, requires a long pause in the life inside it.

A Hotel That Defined the Address

When The Plaza opened on October 1, 1907, its first guest was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, whose carriage pulled up just as the doors opened at 9 a.m. It was an entrance no screenwriter could have improved on, for a hotel destined to become shorthand for New York society.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were regulars. Patricia Kennedy and Peter Lawford held their wedding reception in the ballroom in 1954. Marilyn Monroe appeared in the Terrace Room in 1956 to promote The Prince and the Showgirl, and the Beatles stayed during their first American visit in February 1964, setting off a very different kind of frenzy.

Together, those moments explain what a guest list can’t: The Plaza stayed relevant as the very definition of celebrity changed, from hereditary wealth and royalty to political dynasties, Hollywood and rock ‘n’ roll. The building supplied the continuity while the world outside kept changing.

Photo Credit: The Plaza, A Fairmont Managed Hotel

The Party That Measured Every Party After It

Nothing captures The Plaza’s cultural standing quite like Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. On November 28, 1966, the masked gathering brought Frank Sinatra, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer and Rose Kennedy into the Grand Ballroom, and decades later it’s still the benchmark for a certain kind of New York night: meticulously orchestrated, socially consequential and impossible to recreate simply by spending more money.

Capote understood that bringing the right people together could become a cultural event in its own right. The Plaza was the stage that made it make sense. Four years of closure means four years of weddings, anniversaries, benefits and milestones moving elsewhere. They’ll find beautiful rooms; they’ll simply carry different histories.

Eloise Made Grandeur Personal

For all its associations with wealth and power, The Plaza’s most famous resident may be fictional. Kay Thompson’s Eloise, published in 1955, treated the hotel’s formality with glorious disregard and turned an intimidating grand hotel into something intimate, mischievous and wonderfully accessible.

The hotel has kept that bond alive with Eloise-themed tea, her portrait and mailbox and the pink-and-black Eloise Suite designed by Betsey Johnson. Which is why this closure stings. A child who’s six when the doors close will be at least ten when they reopen. For a hotel with nearly 120 years behind it, that’s a short chapter. For a family hoping to make the Eloise visit at just the right age, it’s a big piece of childhood. If that’s your family, book before January.

Photo Credit: The Plaza, A Fairmont Managed Hotel

The New York We Learned From the Screen

In Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), The Plaza is a polished backdrop for danger and mistaken identity. In The Way We Were, its Fifth Avenue entrance is the scene of a goodbye that still breaks hearts. In Home Alone 2, it’s the ultimate childhood upgrade: the hotel a resourceful kid picks when he suddenly has Manhattan, and someone else’s credit card, at his disposal.

And in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it’s where Gatsby’s carefully built dream finally starts to crack, the grandeur only sharpening the distance between aspiration and reality. Each story uses the hotel differently because the address already says so much. During the closure, the images will be everywhere. Walking through the door won’t be.

The History Includes Who Was Allowed In

A full portrait of The Plaza includes the lines its glamour once drew. On February 12, 1969, members of the National Organization for Women staged a sit-in against the Oak Room’s policy of excluding women at lunchtime; according to the hotel’s own history, they waited four hours without being served. The rule was rescinded four months later.

It belongs alongside the weddings and celebrity arrivals, because it shows another way the hotel took part in the city’s story. Its rooms reflected the era’s ideas about status, gender and access, and became places where those ideas were challenged.

Photo Credit: The Plaza, A Fairmont Managed Hotel

New York Has Been Here Before

This won’t be The Plaza’s first long absence. It closed in 2005 and reopened in 2008 after a reported $450 million restoration that combined the hotel with private residences, sparking a debate about what, exactly, New Yorkers were trying to save.

The lesson still holds: a building can survive while its relationship with the city changes completely. The Plaza’s value depends on being used, not just on standing. There’s also the human side, the staff who greet guests, make up rooms, pour tea and pull off the celebrations that become family lore. The announcement doesn’t detail plans for them, and that deserves close attention as the project moves forward.

What New York Will Miss

Visitors will postpone a long-dreamed-of stay. Families will find another setting for a tradition. Couples will pick another ballroom. And anyone strolling Central Park South will know that one of the city’s most famous doors is temporarily shut.

Afternoon tea in the Palm Court, under its palms and stained-glass dome, explains the depth of that connection: a way to experience The Plaza without booking a room. That chance to take part, however briefly, is what makes it more than a beautiful façade. When it eventually reopens, the measure of its return won’t be the condition of the stone. It will be the moment someone walks in for the very first time and understands why this corner of New York has captured the world’s imagination.

Haute Living Verdict: New York’s most famous hotel is taking a very long nap. Book the Palm Court before January, and bring the kids.

The Plaza, 768 Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, New York, remains open until it suspends operations in January 2027.

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