The cliché “if these walls could talk” is given life in “The Gramercy Park Hotel: A New York Icon,” a new historical nonfiction book celebrating New York City’s Gramercy Park Hotel. Author Max Weissberg’s family owned and operated the luxury destination for decades. The filmmaker turned writer now creates an uneven history of the property and its many stellar guests.
Weissberg begins his story in colonial days, when Manhattan was New Amsterdam. Dutch colonists gave the land where the hotel is now based to formerly enslaved black laborers, who became property owners.
