Mad Men Tour of Midtown Manhattan

14. The Pierre

New York, NY

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The Pierre is yet another almost ludicrously luxurious hotel towering over the southeast corner of Central Park. In "Shut the Door. Have a Seat," the third season finale of "Mad Men," the new firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has set up their first temporary office in a suite at the Pierre after breaking free of the original Sterling Cooper on Madison Avenue. Like the nearby Sherry-Netherland, the Pierre was and is a hotel of choice for the upper echelons of New York society. However, the founder and namesake of the Pierre came from very humble beginnings not in New York, but actually on the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea. Corsica is where Charles Pierre Casalasco started his career in the hospitality industry as a busboy in a prestigious restaurant that catered to European royalty. It is here where Charles Pierre, as he came to be known, got to know the ins and outs of high-class hospitality in the early 20th century. When he finally arrived in New York at the age of 25, Pierre had already studied French cuisine in Paris and made connections with Louis Sherry, one of the founders of the Sherry-Netherland. Working in some of the city's finest restaurants, it did not take long for Pierre to make in-roads with elite New York, including luminaries such as Walter P Chrysler. After selling his restaurant on Park Avenue, Pierre joined forces with Chrysler and others in the joint venture that led to the opening of the 714 room Pierre in 1930. The 15 million dollar hotel, a price in the hundreds of millions adjusted for inflation, had trouble in its early years during the Great Depression. Even as an immediately iconic 41 story skyscraper, the hotel declared bankruptcy two years after its opening. J Paul Getty, massively wealthy industrialist and founder of the Getty Oil Company, purchased the Pierre in 1938 and helped it become profitable by selling a number of its units as coops. The Pierre hotel was, strangely enough, also the site of the infamous Pierre Hotel Robbery in 1972. The audacious crime was planned by Robert Comfort and Samuel Nalo, who had previously pulled off heists at similar hotels such as the Sherry-Netherland, took advantage of a smaller than usual hotel staff on New Year's Day. The two thieves and several associates held 19 hotel staff members and other individuals hostage as they plundered safety deposit boxes containing valuables belonging to the Pierre's affluent guests. By the 1960s, the Pierre had a suitably prestigious reputation. Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces has had ownership of the Pierre since 2005. [Photo credit: Jim Henderson/Public domain]