Knells for a Preppie Hotel

Years before alligator shirts covered every second American torso, long before artifacts of Ivy League style were mass-merchandised, before anyone dreamed of writing an "official handbook," Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel was the premier public place for preppies. Within its vaulting rococo spaces, numberless Princeton boys leered at an endless parade of Vassar girls, while Dartmouth seniors, a little tight, chatted up Smithies. Aging doughboys staggered out of regimental reunions singing. The bubbliness was swell and incessant. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger, writing for and about two generations of preppies, each dragged characters through the gilded Palm Court, under the clock at the Biltmore.

But the movable feast moved on in the 1960s, and the hotel grew musty and passe. Earlier this month, when the hotel's owners suddenly began hacking away at the carved wood and plaster walls on the ground floor, less than a quarter of the guest rooms were occupied. The 200 guests had every right to be startled by the demolition. But from the band of local preservationists, who fought a losing three-day legal battle to stop the demolition, the shock was a mockery: they learned in May that the owners planned to strip the 26-story Biltmore and convert it into a bank headquarters. Keepsake nostalgia for the 68-year-old hotel did not impress its proprietors. "The Biltmore is not architecturally significant," said Renovation Architect Michael Gordon. The famous lobby timepiece, at least, will return after the rebuilding. Yet will anyone rush to an assignation "under the clock at the Bank of America"?

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