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Maybe someday
32
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
15/100Critics
50/100Scholars
Author:
Paulina Bren
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
March 2, 2021
Built in 1927 at the height of the Roaring Twenties, Manhattan's Barbizon Hotel was intended as a safe haven for the 'Modern Woman' seeking a career in the arts. Initially run like a strict college dormitory where staff kept a close eye on its female inhabitantsâincluding luminaries like Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Grace Kelly and Liza Minelliâthe hotel had a colorful history that, as this volume tracks, eventually changed with the times.
What The Reviewers Say
Among the handful of iconic hotels closely entwined with New York’s cultural history, the Barbizon is perhaps less widely known than the Plaza, Algonquin or Waldorf Astoria. But as Paulina Bren’s beguiling new book makes clear, its place in the city’s storied past is no less deserving.
The historian Paulina Bren, in her new book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster), chronicles the experiences of these women, and of some of the hundreds of thousands of others like them, who stayed in the hotel. More than a biography of a building, the book is an absorbing history of labor and women’s rights in one of the country’s largest cities, and also of the places that those women left behind to chase their dreams. In Bren’s telling, some of the same forces that brought them to Manhattan led to the end of the Barbizon as they knew it—and to the New York City that we know today.
...captivating.
Bren has brought the Barbizon into focus, helping us to better understand the place itself and the people who managed it and lived within its walls, some for many years .. That and many other gems have been gleaned by Bren in constructing this cultural memoir, centered on an unusually private shelter in a very public city. The Barbizon should be required reading for thoughtful, free-thinking women of all ages..
