For some reason, I'm very bummed that I will never get to stay in the Plaza Hotel in NYC. Now that it is being converted into condos with only a small, very, very expensive hotel being carved out of a few floors of the place, I'm somehow in a funk. Not that on my salary I could afford to stay there anyway...but there is something lost in this venerable hotel giving in to the more lucrative housing market on Central Park South.

In all the years I've been traveling on business and for pleasure to NYC, I've never stayed there. As an attorney, I had my favorites that were in the business district. As a theatre buff, I had my favorites that were in the theatre district. But now, I will never get to relive
"Home Alone 2" or "Plaza Suite" or any of the many Plaza-based movies. Nor will I be able to tell a cabbie...."I'm staying at the Plaza."

It was part of the great mystique of middle-class status back in the 50's and 60's and into the 70's, and reborn in the 90's--the long saved for and much anticipated New York pre-packaged week at the Plaza--with a couple of nights on Broadway, walking to the Met and Guggenheim, and carriage rides picked up outside the hotel. Now with FAO Schwartz gone and the Plaza going condo, that little corner of the park won't have anything special about it except Bergdorf's. Sad....and, in the grand scheme of things, probably irrelevant....but it's still sad.

Or does the fact that I care make me hopelessly bourgeois?