PEnnsylvania 6–5000

By Amy Barone

I worked across from Hotel Pennsylvania one year,
in a zone of methadone clinics and vagrants hanging on corners.

Far from its glorious start in 1919, the year of my dad’s birth,
when big bands jammed at Café Rouge and the Madhattan Room
in the world’s largest hotel.

Silent film stars Clara Bow and Nancy Carroll bathed in
champagne
and William Faulkner wrote one of his novels there.

Up to the pandemic of 2020, the famed hotel attracted tourists
and visitors,
as well as canines from the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
nearby.

From early 2022 through fall, 2023, current owners tore down
the building,
its massive front colonnade of Indiana limestone. No one came to
its rescue —
not the Landmarks Commission or the tax man.

A month later, I phoned the hotel, dialing the iconic number
made famous in a song by Glenn Miller and his orchestra in 1940
and the 1954 film The Glenn Miller Story.

The longest city number continuously in use still worked.