Few buildings in American civic life carry the symbolic weight of Henry Janeway Hardenbergh's 1907 French Renaissance château at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. The Plaza has always been less a hotel than a fixed point in New York's self-image — the white-glazed brick and terracotta facade, its copper-green mansard roofline visible from the Pond in Central Park as clearly as from the street, functioning almost as a punctuation mark at the foot of Olmsted and Vaux's great park. The nineteen-story structure, designated a New York City landmark in 1969, underwent a major restoration and partial residential conversion completed in 2008, with Stonehill & Taylor overseeing the hotel interiors across 282 guest rooms and suites. The Palm Court remains the building's most architecturally irreplaceable space — a vaulted skylight ceiling, fluted Corinthian marble columns, and a Baccarat crystal chandelier of considerable scale, the room framed by potted palms in painted green jardinieres that have been a fixture here for over a century. Guest rooms show two registers: the more traditional suites deploy gilt-framed pier mirrors, Louis XVI-style commodes with ormolu mounts, and crystal sconces against white paneled walls, while the park-facing rooms adopt a softer contemporary palette of grey and warm taupe, lacquered ebonized credenzas with brass banding, and patterned drapes opening directly onto Central Park views. The lobby-level lounge, its coffered plasterwork ceiling hung with tiered crystal chandeliers above white marble floors, keeps the building's Beaux-Arts ambitions entirely intact.

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