New York Biltmore Hotel

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The New York Biltmore Hotel was a luxury hotel in New York City founded by John McEntee Bowman. The hotel was designed by the architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore (who also designed the adjoining Grand Central Terminal) and had a red granite skin. It was one of three hotels built as part of the Terminal City development. The others were the Commodore Hotel, now the Grand Hyatt New York, and the Roosevelt Hotel, still in operation.

In 1942, the hotel was the location of the Biltmore Conference which was a meeting of mostly Zionist groups that produced the Biltmore Program, a series of demands regarding Palestine.

The building was gutted in the early 1980s by owner Paul Milstein (Milford Computer), and The Bank of America Plaza Building, at 335 Madison Avenue, was built from the hotel's steel skeleton. The office building retains the hotel's famous piano and lobby clock , one of many which claim to be the basis for the expression "Meet me under the clock".

[edit] Role In Popular Culture

The lobby of the Biltmore was used in the filming of the 1984 film Ghostbusters as the haunted hotel where the Ghostbusters achieve their first successful ghost capture. Although the hotel is unnamed in the film, previews for the upcoming Ghostbusters video game have indicated that the haunted hotel is supposed to be the Biltmore itself. However, upon release the hotel was revealed to have retained its title from the movie (though unmentioned in the script), the Sedgewick Hotel.

In the fourth episode of the first season of The Cosby Show (titled "You're not a mother night", which originally aired on December 6, 1984), Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) vows to take his wife, Clair Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad), to the Biltmore hotel for dinner and he says they will stay the night at the hotel. To his wife, Cliff says: "I know the manager, I delivered his baby and he owes me because the baby does not look like him or his wife."