Douglas Keeve’s Hotel Gramercy Park, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, follows the Schragerization of the formerly shabby-chic hotel into its swanky new incarnation. At a party for the movie April 26, Steven Weissberg, whose family owned the hotel for decades, was nostalgic for its subtler charms. “In the past,” he said, celebrity guests “went there not to be seen, to be in the back. Jodie Foster came in with the classic Bob Dylan–style hooded sweatshirt. ‘Mr. Weissberg, Jodie Foster just went up in the elevators. You don’t want to go meet her.’” Now celebrities go to the Gramercy to see and be seen, said Weissberg, who remains a rent-stabilized tenant in the hotel. “It has its good points, and it has its—when I’m trying to go home, I get a little ticklish if there’s a major event on the roof with Beyoncé or someone of that nature,” he said. Ticklish? “Getting into the lobby, getting through security to the elevator.”
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