El hotel Barbizon

Welcome to the Barbizon, New York's legendary women's hotel. After World War I and with new political rights, women came to Manhattan's dazzling new skyscrapers to inaugurate their economic independence. But they were not going to accept less comfort than the men enjoyed. Built in 1927, the Barbizon Hotel was designed as a luxurious retreat for the "modern woman" who wanted a career in the art world. Over the years, its nearly 700 small rooms have housed many ambitious young women seeking fame and fortune: among them, Molly Brown, survivor of the Titanic; actresses Grace Kelly, Liza Minnelli, Ali MacGraw and Jaclyn Smith; and writers Joan Didion, Gael Greene, Diane Johnson, and Meg Wolitzer. Sylvia Plath recounted her stay there in The Bell Jar. Likewise, Mademoiselle magazine and the Katharine Gibbs secretarial school housed their students, and the Ford Modeling Agency its young models. Despite the fact that not every woman who walked through the doors of the Barbizon was destined for success, the hotel offered its residents a room of their own and a life without family obligations: it gave women the opportunity to remake themselves as they wished.The Barbizon Hotel is a brilliant cultural story, a colorful and glamorous portrayal of the lives of young women who, from the jazz age of the 1920s to the tumultuous period of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, came to New York looking for something more.