On Hotel Pennsylvania - Dan Barry in NYT:

'Bit by bit, floor by floor, the building that once rose 22 stories over Penn Station is shrinking before the city’s very eyes. The black netting draped over its ever-diminishing brick is like a magician’s handkerchief; once removed, it will reveal — nothing.
Behold: The Great Disappearing Act of the Hotel Pennsylvania.
This isn’t — or wasn’t — just any building. This was once the largest hotel on earth, with 2,200 rooms, shops, restaurants, its own newspaper, and a telephone number immortalized by the bandleader Glenn Miller with a 1940 song “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” for which the complete original lyrics are: Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand

Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand Pennsylvania Six Five Oh Oh Oh That’s it.

But the Hotel Pennsylvania never quite had the cachet of the Plaza or the Waldorf Astoria. It came to depend on traveling salespeople, conventions devoted to dentistry or footwear, and tourists seeking affordable accommodations. In recent years, perhaps the most charitable review was: conveniently located.
The hotel figured prominently in Big Band-era lore and counted among its many millions of guests the consequential (Fidel Castro) and the canine (the Westminster Kennel Club). It offered an accessible urbanity, a kind of cosmopolitanism for the common folk. When a young soldier aged by combat returned home at the close of World War II, for example, he made good on a vow to spend his first night stateside at the hotel with the phone number he knew by heart.'

(…)

‘Then there was the time an unregistered guest scampered past the registration desk to leap from table to table, upending the hotel lobby’s desired atmosphere of orderly calm. A bystander finally grabbed the acrobatic interloper — a monkey, from who knows where — and the two shared a cab to the nearest police station.’

(…)

‘Every Sunday morning, Mr. Fusco passes the building on his way to serve as an usher at the Latin High Mass at the Church of the Holy Innocents on West 37th Street. “I’m the guy doing the collections on the right side,” he said.
He knows that the demolition site is quiet on Sundays. He knows where a three-inch opening exists between two chain-linked doors. And he knows how to summon recordings of old broadcasts from the Café Rouge with a few taps on his phone.
You might see him one of these Sunday mornings. A man in a fedora, thrusting his cellphone deep into the side of a doomed building, filling the dusty void with sweet Big Band swing. And the volume is turned way, way up.
Pennsylvania Six. Five. Oh. Oh.
Oh.’

Read the article here.

Somewhere in 1995 I went every weekday to Pennsylvania Hotel, because I was taking English courses there.

I wrote about this experience, first in a Dutch newspaper, later the texts have been translated and published in the collection Amuse-Bouche (Comma press, 2008).

‘The ad in the subway had said: “New Americans learn English. Call 1-800-ENGLISH. I had called a few days later. Kristina answered the phone. She congratulated me for having decided to learn English and told me that the language institute was located in hotel Pennsylvania.’

I met Elvira in my class who was an inspiration for one of the characters in my second novel “Silent Extras.” A couple of years later we had dinner in Madrid.
In my novella ‘The Saint of the Impossible” the hotel plays an important role as well and Marc Wilkins made a movie based on the novella, see here.

I passed Hotel Pennsylvania many times, but I’ve never been back to the hotel.

That’s a pity because the slight decay and the vague echoes of grandeur manage to attract me.

Now it’s too late.

We’ll always have literature, sometimes it’s your own literature.