# Talk:St. Regis New York

I can only base this on my own experience, and conversations with employees - as I was taken there by my parents from an early age, and worked there one summer and into the fall of 1978. 
During the early '60s the main dining room was at the center-south side of the original building (perhaps on location of the earlier Palm Court) and was called the Oak Room. Only a comparatively small space existed on the main level at the time for sidework, and staff were required to climb and descend two flights of stairs to the basement kitchen and dishwasher/pantry with stacked trays. (We were told this by the waiters, and I later experienced it, but by that time only busboys and dishwashers had to carry trays up and down the stairs, and that only rarely.)
Sometime before I showed up to work in '78 the Oak Room had been turned into the the main kitchen: with some prep work, the range/grill, dishwasher, and room service staging area now all located in the footprint of the erstwhile Oak Room, where Cher and Salvador Dali (who made a very striking entrance one time when I was there as a child, dashing up to someone's table, kneeling down and kissing her hand) were said to be habitues. In order to accomplish the changeover they had taken a very fancy art deco elevator built along with the annex, and dedicated it exclusively to room service - hence the need for the two new elevators flanking the erstwhile entrance to the Oak Room, which became an odd looking, blank, arch-formed end wall. (They should pay to build it back! with escalators!)
The Oak Room and the later King Cole Room did a roaring lunch business every day but were mostly dead at night during the week. They had the highest quality food in the early '60s, and I think it was seen as a loss leader to keep their pedigreed guests coming back. A lot of preparation remained in the old kitchen downstairs including the bakery, after the Oak Room closed. I remember passing by the ghostly apparition of the then-defunct longest cookline/range I've ever seen, on my daily errand of running cakes and deserts up from the bakery.  
In the configuration of circa 1964 there were three rooms where dining was possible: the Oak Room, in the original building, a lounge (known as Psyche at one point as I recall) and the King Cole Bar. Both the lounge and King Cole were located in the annex. The three contiguous rooms, all located south of the lobby area, were connected by two rectangular portals located on their side walls to the north, with the double doors generally open - and by a hall along the back, that ran from a screened-off west-facing door at the southwest corner of King Cole, then behind the lounge having a south-facing screened-off door, and finally to the kitchen stairs located in back of the Oak Room. The stair area there had quite a large screen with sidetable space and supplies behind, which appeared on its public side as a three-faced rectangular-bevel-sectored mirror with oak wainscotting, having a very large oaken representation of a teapot on the front, centered along the back wall of the room to match the its expansive oak box-paneling. 
The point about the mural is that it was originally on the south wall of the King Cole Bar (or at least it was in my experience, starting in the early '60s) behind the long bar, which took up most of the south wall of the large room which became Lespinasse. I did see it after Lespinasse moved in, and the most unique characteristic of the room save the mural had been preserved, that being a smooth-sculpted plaster ceiling designed to look like a large tent draped overhead, in stylized form. The Oak Room ceiling also had a fancy configuration with indirect lighting, about 30 feet high, above its light-toned oak paneled walls. I remember when Sheraton came in they gussied up this spare soft palette with two giant pictures of some Astors staring at each other across the room, backed by over-broad concentric back-layers of red velvet, with ropes and tassels.
I worked in what was called the King Cole Room, the main dining room at the time, which had been modified from its earlier all-encompassing Medieval theme with escutcheons and such. The earlier bar/restaurant that was King Cole had a dark and rather oppressive atmosphere, with its colored decorations looming in darkness and the lights shining always on the mural. The King Cole Room where I worked, by contrast had a lot of light, usually, and three floor elevations, tiered along the three sides opposite the mural, with the walkway for customers and staff as the middle tier. (The lounge had become the bar at this point.) The central lower level could be cleared of tables and used as a dance floor, and often was on weekends while I was there. What I heard from employees, some of whom stayed there for a good part of their lives, was that the ice skating rink was located in what became the King Cole Bar, or maybe concurrently with it.
The believed-by-me circa 1960 re-do with the fancy ceilings and intervening lounge, did have a lot of style, consciously playing on the lack of windows to take advantage of the possible lighting effects of intimacy versus the formal public lobby, which was lit by clerestory windows. The later Astor Court (It's like an aquarium.) at the time was copiously paneled in flat, modernist dark red polished marble (whence the deco elevator later tasked with room service) against a black, brass-lined floor partially covered by a deep-pile, expensive looking rug - to contrast with the the formal and airy design of the lobby proper in the older part. There, two brass-railinged steps down from the lobby proper, was a low, geometrically patterned ceiling, to add to the contrast, and topiary boxwoods flanking a broadly recessed glass entrance to the lounge. A floor-to-ceiling marble portal to the left led into the King Cole Bar. Finally, there was a florist right off the newer now-old lobby, with a door matching that of the deco elevator, to add olfactory sumptuousness to it all. At one point I remember they had a lady harpist playing in there: Absolute, Deepest, Luxury.
I think Mr. Balsa really knew how to run a hotel. And I'm so grateful to have this excellent record of it provided by Wikipedia. 2603:7000:C901:5F00:74E0:5119:5598:83D8 (talk) 06:19, 12 January 2024 (UTC)