page_title: Oak Room (Plaza Hotel)
section_title: Description and history
hierarchical_section_title: Oak Room (Plaza Hotel) / Description and history
caption_attribution_description: English: Oak Room (Plaza Hotel) entrance on 59th Street
context_page_description: The Oak Room was a bar and, later, a restaurant in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. The bar was open from 1907 until its closing in 2011. It was distinct from the adjoining Oak Bar.
context_section_description: Designed by Plaza Hotel architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in a German Renaissance style, the room features walls of English or Flemish oak, frescoes of Bavarian castles (by a painter whose identity is now lost to history), faux wine casks carved into the woodwork, and a grape-laden chandelier topped by a barmaid hoisting a stein hanging from the twenty-foot-high ceiling. It opened in 1907 as the Men's Bar, closed as a bar during Prohibition (1920-1933) during which time it was known as the Café or Oak Lounge, and re-opened in 1934 as a restaurant under the name Oak Room, maintaining men-only lunches on weekdays until 1969, when Betty Friedan and other members of the National Organization for Women staged a protest. The restaurant closed while the hotel was closed for renovation (2005–2008), reopening in 2008 after renovations with interior design by Annabelle Selldorf. The Oak Room closed again in 2011.
  The Oak Room was long a grand, opulent, and elegant space. Critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in 1971, contrasted the "dignity, scale and period authenticity" of the Oak Room to other more modernized spaces in the hotel. It was accordingly frequented, like the Plaza's other spaces, by the rich and famous – George M. Cohan was a regular to the extent that his booth was named Cohan's Corner and bears a bronze plaque to that effect.
  It was, however, a descent into alleged vulgarity that led to the 2011 closing.
  Central to the 2011 closing was a dispute between the owners of the Plaza Hotel (various investors led by the El-Ad Group) and Eli Gindi, owner of the Oak Room and lessee of the Plaza Hotel. Although unpaid rent and other matters were alleged, a major point of contention was the "Day and Night" parties held on Saturday afternoons. These events (crucial to the Oak Room's profitability, bringing in $180,000 in an afternoon) were rowdy and featured loud music, and were described by the hotel's owners as damaging to the hotel's reputation and disturbing to the hotel's guests.
caption: Oak Room entrance on 59th Street
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