Paulina Bren. Photo / Supplied
The Barbizon: The New York Hotel That Set Women Free
by Paulina Bren (Two Roads, $38)
The Barbizon, founded in 1927, was a hotel located on East 63rd St, in Manhattan's Upper East Side. It had 720 single-occupant rooms spread over 23 storeys and advertised itself as "New York's Most
Exclusive Hotel Residence for Young Women", many of whom were on their first visit to the metropolis. Did it provide needed and safe accommodation? Was it a recipe for trouble? Or was it something completely different?
Paulina Bren explores the hotel's history in her new book, The Barbizon: The New York Hotel That Set Women Free. The extraordinary cast list includes young actors, like Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford and Grace Kelly, writers like Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, as well as future models, secretaries, and businesswomen. With a focus on arts, the Barbizon was a safe haven for aspiring women when they were faced with the pitfalls of big-city living for the first time.
No man was permitted above the lobby level and residents' rooms were strictly out of bounds to visiting males. Anyone wanting to get to the floors above had to pass the scrutiny of the sharp-eyed manager, Mrs Mae Sibley, who vetted her residents with a notorious A, B or C scale and who would turn away many suitors who wanted to present themselves as tradesmen, doctors, or even gynaecologists.
Bren's book is a lively anecdotal account. The Barbizon gives each era a particular focus. From the "Redoubtable" Molly Brown, who survived the sinking of the Titanic, to the 1940s with its need to provide exclusive secretarial services for the supremos of the war-effort, to the gloved, pill-box-hatted and high-heeled Mademoiselle magazine interns in the 1950s, and to the notorious Sex and the Single Girl years of the early 1960s, it provides a full coverage.