The New York Four Seasons is not the most welcoming hotel, architecturally speaking. Designed by I. M. Pei and situated on East Fifty-seventh Street, between Madison and Park, it greets visitors with an intimidating slab of limestone façade and a metal awning that seems to want to clobber you. Reviewing the building in the Times when it opened, in 1993, Paul Goldberger was taken by “a reception desk that looks like a Judgment Day platform.” Rooms now start at twelve hundred and ninety-five dollars. Or they did, two months ago.
Like so many businesses, the Four Seasons closed in March. On April 2nd it reopened, transformed into the city’s cheapest and most civic-minded hotel—the first to host health-care workers free of charge. As of last week, there were a hundred and sixty such guests, sleeping, showering, and enjoying grab-and-go meals between long shifts of attempting to save the lives of Covid-19 patients. All are screened each time they enter the hotel, which is now using its more human-scaled entrance on East Fifty-eighth Street. Nurses take temperatures and run through checklists of symptoms before people are admitted to the “green zone” (or banished to the “red zone” for possible off-site treatment). Videos provided by the Four Seasons show that the lobby’s usual cadre of super-attentive valets, bellhops, and concierges has been replaced by impassive metal stanchions, green directional arrows, and yellow crime-scene tape to enforce social distancing, although the onyx, marble, and soaring ceilings remain.
“It’s basically hospital housing, but Four Seasons-style,” explained Dr. Dara Kass, an E.R. physician at Columbia University Medical Center, speaking on the phone from her eighth-floor room. “You know why you’re here when you walk into the building,” she said, describing the lobby’s vibe as “purposeful.” But, she added, “the bed itself is still a Four Seasons bed.” Like many guests, she was keeping away from home so as not to expose her family to the virus; Kass has a son with a compromised immune system due to a liver transplant. “This room was really a godsend,” she said. “I have so many doctor friends who are living in their basements, or a closet. I have friends who have rented Airbnbs. I have a friend who rented an R.V. She and her husband are both E.R. doctors, and their daughter had a liver transplant like my son did, so they moved to the R.V. in the driveway and their au pair is living with the children inside the house.”
Another hotel guest is Hallie Burnett, a nurse from Houston who had volunteered for New York duty. She flew in without knowing how she’d be accommodated, so it was a nice surprise, she said, when she heard, upon landing, that the Four Seasons had a room for her. She found many of the usual amenities—fancy shampoo, body wash, zillion-thread-count sheets—but also some more of-the-moment ones: “Big things of hand sanitizer, paper towels, disinfectant, gloves, biohazard bags to put our scrubs in as we walk in the door.” There is no housekeeping, let alone turndown service, but Burnett said that guests can leave bags of dirty towels and linens out in the hallway for pickup, reducing the number of interactions between guests and staff. (According to a spokesperson, the hotel has roughly a hundred employees still on the job, down from its usual five hundred.)
The New York Four Seasons took this mission on at the prompting of its owner, Ty Warner, the Beanie Baby mogul. Rudy Tauscher, the hotel’s general manager, organized the operational changes—effected in a mere five days—with the help of International SOS, a medical and travel-security consultancy. A German native, Tauscher has been working in New York hospitality for more than twenty years. On 9/11, he was managing the Trump International Hotel and Tower, which took in guests who had been working in the World Trade Center. He remembers hosting people from Cantor Fitzgerald. “It was terrible,” he said. He added that the coronavirus pandemic poses a different kind of challenge, and not only because of the health risks to his staff: “We’re very service-driven. The human touch and connecting with humans is in our DNA, as with most of the luxury industry. But we are eliminating as much of that as possible.” He sounded a bit rueful, or maybe just sleep-deprived. He, too, is self-isolating from family and friends—as well as from guests and staff. “No more mingling,” he said. “It’s all very abstract at this point.”
Several other city hotels, with Governor Andrew Cuomo’s encouragement, have followed in the Four Seasons’ wake, including the InterContinental Times Square, Room Mate Grace, Yotel, and the Hudson Hotel. (Not the Trump International, however; as Tauscher pointed out, it is in a different category, owing to its many floors of residential condominiums.) Wythe Hotel, in Williamsburg, has partnered with N.Y.U. Langone to house some of that hospital’s staff. Like Tauscher, Peter Lawrence, Wythe’s owner, expressed a kind of existential hotelier’s regret at present circumstances. “Hospitality people solve issues with empathy and kindness, by gathering people together and cooking for them and caring for them. And none of our skills are relevant at the moment; some are even dangerous,” he wrote in an e-mail. “But we are starting to do our small part now.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we have scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
