Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out why two women who sued the Pierre Hotel in 1973 will be honored guests there tonight. We’ll also get details on a bill to regulate hotels that the City Council approved.
One evening in September 1973, two lawyers in their 20s were walking uptown from the legal publishing house where they worked. One of them, Lisa Cohen, said, “Let’s go have a drink at the Pierre.”
They walked into the lobby, entering one of Manhattan’s swankiest hotels. They found places at the bar. They talked for a while.
Eventually, the other lawyer, Leslie Kaye, said something about how they were being ignored. One of them got the bartender’s attention and asked for two glasses of white wine. Lawyers can be disputatious, even when they have been friends for more than 50 years, so it’s probably no surprise that they disagree on which one did that.
But they agree on the bartender’s response: “No.”
Kaye asked if he wanted them to move to a table. Again the answer was no.
“He said, ‘Let me get the manager,’” Kaye recalled. “We looked at each other and said, ‘That’s pretty crazy.’”
The manager appeared and, Kaye said, told them that “the Hotel Pierre does not serve women unescorted at the bar” — or anywhere else on the premises.
“The next day, we sued them,” Kaye said.
They won, first in a proceeding before the city’s Commission on Human Rights and later before a judge in State Supreme Court, who upheld the commission’s finding of sex discrimination. The commission had awarded each of them $350 for “personal humiliation and damages suffered,” according to a news account at the time.
Tonight they will return to the Pierre for a toast celebrating their victory — and the commission’s order directing the Pierre to serve anyone.
They were new to New York in 1973. Kaye, who had moved to the city with her law degree from the University of Denver, said she had read about the Pierre the year before, after five men wearing tuxedos strolled in, held a doorman at gunpoint, handcuffed 21 startled guests and strolled out with $3 million worth of bracelets, brooches and cash from the hotel’s safe deposit boxes.
Kaye went on to work as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and later had her own firm in New York before she moved to Arizona, then to Denver. Cohen became an administrative law judge for the city’s Environmental Control Board and earned a master’s degree in critical social work.
At the time of their suit, they were working for Matthew Bender and Company, which publishes legal reference books, and cramming for the bar exam. Cohen said that Kaye wanted to call the police when the hotel refused to serve them. Cohen worried that doing so would haunt them on the character and fitness section of the bar exam, which asks lawyers seeking to practice in New York if they had ever been arrested.
At the human rights commission, the chairman, Jerome Becker, found the Pierre guilty of violating a city law banning sex discrimination. “Napoleon met his Waterloo — now the Hotel Pierre meets its Waterloo,” he declared when he announced his decision. (Becker was a longtime associate of Abraham Beame, who was months away from being elected mayor when Kaye and Cohen filed their complaint.)
Becker’s ruling followed testimony by the Pierre’s maître d’hôtel, Emile Pape, who was known as Mr. Emile. There was also testimony from Barbara Shack, the director of women’s rights at the New York Civil Liberties Union, who said that she and a colleague had been refused service at the Pierre a couple of days after Kaye and Cohen were turned away, for the same reason: They were women.
The Pierre’s lawyer “tried to imply that perhaps these women had gone to drink at the Pierre for immoral purposes,” according to The Daily News. And when Pape was on the witness stand, the lawyer “got down to the nitty-gritty,” The News said, asking the Pierre’s manager “if the hotel ever had problems with ‘hookers’ and whether he would recognize one if he saw one.”
Tonight’s toast, according to Spiridon Sarantopoulos, the general manager of the Pierre, will be about applauding two women “who knew that women supporting women was and is a critical initiative.”
And yes, the hotel is paying for the drinks.
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny day, with a high near the mid-60s and a moderate breeze. Tonight, the sky will be clear with a temperature near the mid-40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today (for Shemini Atzereth).
The latest Metro news
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Harvey Weinstein faces trial: A judge in Manhattan consolidated two sex crime cases, one new and one old, against the former movie mogul. The trial is likely to take place next spring.
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A real estate giant resigns: Howard Lorber, the chief executive of the real estate brokerage Douglas Elliman, stepped down amid criticism of his leadership and his failure to adequately address sexual assault allegations against agents in the company.
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New Jersey House race narrows: The campaign of Sue Altman, the Democrat challenging Representative Tom Kean Jr., a Republican, received a $4 million donation after polls showed her closing in on Mr. Kean. Altman’s supporters said negative advertising by Republicans had given her a boost.
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Knicks superfan dies: Stan Asofsky, who was a regular presence at Madison Square Garden, befriending players and heckling opposing players and the refs, was 87.
City Council approves a hotel safety bill
Hotels in New York will be required to have licenses, panic buttons for employees and 24-hour staffing at front desks under a bill that the City Council approved on Wednesday.
The bill, which is intended to improve safety for workers and guests, was supported by powerful industry groups, including the Hotel Association of New York City, a trade group representing more than 300 hotels that had initially opposed it. The New York Hotel & Gaming Trades Council, which represents about 35,000 hotel and casino workers in New York and New Jersey, had lobbied hard for the measure.
The vote, by 45 to 4, came after months of negotiations with the hotel industry. Julie Menin, a council member from Manhattan who sponsored the bill, worked with hotel industry officials on a compromise after some owners had called the bill a “nuclear bomb” for the industry. Hotels with 100 rooms or fewer will be exempt from a requirement to hire core employees directly; they may still use subcontractors for staffing.
Mayor Eric Adams is close to the hotel union and is expected to support the bill. His office did not respond to a request for comment. But Adams, who was indicted on federal corruption charges last month, had sounded a positive note when asked about the hotel bill in August.
The bill also has the support of the city’s five district attorneys, who sent a letter to the Council noting that criminal complaints to the Police Department “originate from hotels and motels at a far higher rate than from other types of locations.”
Some hotel groups still oppose the bill and say it would be too onerous for the industry, which is still recovering from the coronavirus pandemic. Kevin Carey, the interim president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a national industry group, said the bill would harm minority-owned businesses.
Its passage “caps a legislative scramble and special interest power play that will do irreparable harm to the city’s hotel industry and tourism economy,” he said.
METROPOLITAN diary
Practiced hands
Dear Diary:
After a long, glorious walk in the summer New York sun, I took the Q train home. As I stood in the car with the train rattling on, I noticed a petite woman sitting nearby who was knitting intently.
Her needles pulled a single string of yarn from a bag on the floor while the square she was working on grew ever larger. These were practiced hands, I thought, and they were drawing the attention of other riders as well.
I put away my reading and gazed at her fingers as they moved with a speed and dexterity that I was surprised still existed in this world of mechanical perfection.
When the train got to my stop, I moved toward the door, and she looked up to see where we were. I gave her a broad smile and two thumbs up.
She smiled back shyly, and then cast her eyes back down to her work.
— George Donovan
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post A Toast to a Night When 2 Women Made History appeared first on New York Times.
