A Fabulous Amsterdam Hotel With a Scandalous Palm Beach Connection
Plus, more AirBnB bluster and "gate lice."
Good morning and welcome to fall! I’m sitting here in the gardens at the Hotel Pulitzer Amsterdam. In addition to being one of my favorite hotels, for those into hospitality lore, it’s also a piece of one of the more fascinating and dramatic high society tales.
Made up of 25 historic townhouses, it was cobbled together in the 1960s by Peter Pulitzer and Howard Johnson to create what they dubbed Amsterdam’s first five-star hotel. (Promotional material even referred to it as “Howard Johnson’s Hotel on the Canals.”) Johnson brought a brick from the original New Amsterdam settlement in the U.S. to put in the hotel’s walls at the opening. The whole thing was an odd proposition, not least because Howard Johnson’s name was synonymous with budget motels.
Around the same time it opened, in 1970, Pulitzer divorced from his wife, Lilly Pulitzer, in whose fashion empire he had invested and helped launch.
“This was the beginning of the Pulitzer empire,” Peter Pulitzer would say about the hotel in Amsterdam. “It was also the end of the marriage,” wrote the Palm Beach Post.
Pulitzer was the grandson of the man whose tabloid shamelessness built a media empire—and later whitewashed it with his eponymous award. Peter (born Herbert) was a legendary playboy who at a young age built his own little empire of orange groves and cattle ranches in Florida. He eloped with the young Lilly Pulitzer in the early 1950s. The marriage was so sudden and surprising, when he called her father to tell him he’d married his daughter, Lilly’s father reportedly replied, “Which one?”
Lilly Pulitzer’s dresses started, so the tale goes, when she returned from a “nuthouse” (her own choice of words). To get a hobby, she opened a stand in Palm Beach selling juice squeezed from oranges on her husband’s farms. Eager to have dresses that hid the stains better, she ordered ones made with bright florals and quickly found that everybody she knew wanted them.
Every profile of the Pulitzers seems to have been written in heat, as writers and those quoted talk about Peter as the sexiest and most virile man to walk down Worth Avenue. Here’s Vanity Fair:
“All you have to do is look at pictures of young Pulitzer to see the attraction—think Apollo Belvedere goes early Esquire. Enviably handsome, tall, tanned, outdoorsy, sporty, a he-man who was his own man.”
She, however, was almost a caricature of eccentric WASP nonchalance. One of my favorite bits about her is that when asked by a reporter writing a profile what her parents were like, Lilly replied: “I don’t have a clue.”
Not long after the Pulitzer opened, Howard Johnson’s involvement ended–although I did find this fantastic photo online where the original hotel has a sign with his name above it. The images on Alamy show a property that is a far cry from today. The spaces look cramped, sterile, economical.
Nowadays, the Hotel Pulitzer Amsterdam is a touchstone for Amsterdam, and one of a handful of contemporary hotels worldwide that visitors have a romantic attachment to. The kind of pricey-but-not-1k-a-night hotels that when you announce you’re staying there it’s almost a heuristic for saying you care about certain things—history, charm, whimsy, crowd, vibe—more than straight-up luxury or flash. Think the Fasano in Rio, the Jeff Klein-era Sunset Tower, Nine Orchard, or even, hear me out, the EDITION in Miami Beach. (So many have tried to emulate its formula.)
The Pulitzer Amsterdam as a contemporary hotel icon is the result of a makeover in the mid-2010s by somebody who I’m lucky enough to now call a friend, LORE Group’s creative director, Jacu Strauss. Strauss also designed the Riggs and Lyle hotels in Washington, D.C. and 100 Shoreditch in London. (We met after I covered the Lyle, which as a resident of D.C. I fell in love with because it filled a massive hole the city had—an affordable but chic neighborhood hotel.)
At the Pulitzer Amsterdam, steel-frame glassed-in walkways connecting the houses let the gardens be the star, and up, down, and around various stairs and halls you can find lots of little surprises. The Pulitzer Bar–which is worth grabbing a drink at even if you aren’t staying at the hotel–is a favorite corner of mine.
The adulation showered on the property meant its prices also sometimes got as high as the ultra-luxury hotels in Amsterdam, and Strauss recently designed new high-end suites at the property and a spa in one of the townhouses called The Beauty House to meet those high-priced expectations. (More luxury hotels should have spas designed to not look like afterthoughts crammed in to basements!)
Every project of Jacu’s has at least one effortlessly sophisticated element that I get fixated on. At the Pulitzer it’s in the lobby where the gleaming elevators are cut out of rich blue velvet curtains–an elegant solution to often utilitarian elevator surrounds.
Peter Pulitzer owned the hotel until the early 90s, when he sold it to another legendary playboy, Aga Khan. I’m curious, though, if back then his extended family’s philanthropic endeavors gave the family name enough of a sheen for them to forget his more recent foray into the tabloids.
In the 1980s, one of the most shocking high society scandals involved Peter and his second wife, Roxanne Pulitzer. Roxanne, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “blew into [Palm Beach], driving a Lincoln Continental with a 60-foot house trailer in tow, a ripe little cheerleader just a year or so out of high school in Cassadaga, New York, a small town of 900 near Buffalo.” While living in a mobile home, she met Peter and they married just a few years after the opening of the Amsterdam hotel. They had two children before it all fell apart and tumbled into a courtroom.
There, with the public devouring it week after week in 1983, they accused each other of the wildest acts. Roxanne was accused, TIME reported, of going “to bed with a local real estate salesman, a French baker, a Belgian race-car driver, the beautiful young wife of a handsome old Kleenex heir, an alleged drug dealer and a supernatural trumpet.” (The trumpet piece took on a life of its own. She was depicted as so libidinous that the tabloids, especially the New York Post, took an anecdote about her keeping a trumpet nearby and turned it into the headline “I Slept With a Trumpet.” She later posed with trumpets for Playboy)
Here’s Hunter S. Thompson on Roxanne:
“She was an incorrigible coke slut, he said, and a totally unfit mother. She stayed up all night at discos and slept openly with her dope pusher, among others … on top of all that, she was a lesbian, or at least some kind of pansexual troilist. In six and a half years of marriage, she had humped almost everything she could get her hands on.”
Peter, in turn, was accused of being an insatiable drug addict who had pointed a gun at her head and also committed incest with his then-teenage daughter. Said teenage daughter took the stand and declared that, actually, her stepmother Roxanne made the move after they did some coke in a West Palm Beach disco. “She said that if I ever felt I wanted a lesbian relationship [that] she wanted to be the one I got involved with,” she avowed. The divorce proceedings ended with Roxanne getting nearly nothing.
She got the last laugh, though. Decades later, Peter’s diminished fortune meant he needed a bailout. Roxanne’s latest husband was the one who saved him.
DEPARTMENT OF GRIEVANCES
I’ve never understood how the luxury wellness hospitality industry was dominated for so long by the Germans. I don’t think of shutting myself off in the middle of nowhere with Germans as the most relaxing. Perhaps that’s why Marbella Club has become so successful—losing weight and feeling healthy is a lot nicer somewhere sunny with Spaniards. Well, now life-coach and motivational speaker Tony Robbins is getting in on the game. He’s teaming up with Sam Nazarian (known for the Mondrian and Delano) for a new wellness group called The Estate. I don’t love the name—it feels flat and unimaginative. According to the New York Times, by 2030 they will open 15 hotels and 10 longevity centers. The first locations for hotels will be St. Kitts, Britain, Italy, and Switzerland. The first longevity center will be in LA and open in late 2025. “Membership at the longevity centers will cost $35,000 a year, while rooms at the hotels are expected to cost around $1,000 per night.”
There’s plenty of room for some rah-rah hometown pride in travel journalism, but the BBC running a story with the headline, “The English wine that's rivalling Champagne” is a bit … much. While it sounds like there’s a lot to be excited about in southern England’s sparkling wine industry (and potentially even more to be excited about in the future), it’s a streeeeetch to say rivaling champagne.
Is “gate lice” a well known term? I must admit, until I read this Thrillist piece I’d never heard it. The phrase refers to people who crowd the boarding gate before it’s their turn, which can lead to delays or hinder people whose turn it is to board. The piece spends a lot of time trying to pathologize something that seems pretty obvious—we all want to get on first, especially since airlines have designed the boarding process to stimulate our need to get on first so that we’ll pay extra to do so!
There is something so sad about quantifying “the exact hour you hit peak vacation happiness,” which turns out to be hour 43. After things stop being novel, or novel enough, the joy fades. If that’s the case, people really need to start to think about their travels differently. I don’t think “finding happiness” should be an expectation one has while traveling. Relaxation, excitement, beauty, self-discovery in adversity, escape, bonding–these are all realistic and impactful pursuits. But I think we’re all making ourselves miserable chasing “happiness” or “life-changing experiences” while traveling.
Color me skeptical given its track record of AirBnB’s founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s latest pronouncement that AirBnB is going to be about more than homes. “We’re going to take the AirBnB model, and we’re going to bring it to a lot of different categories,” he said at the Skift Global Forum, and claimed they’ll launch two to three initiatives a year that will have the goal of becoming billion-dollar businesses.
TRAVEL INDUSTRY NEWS
The Beverly Hilton is featuring Paris Hilton-themed suites for a limited time
Americans can now renew their passport online
Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines are officially merging
Travel can slow the aging process, new study says
JetBlue is planning to introduce airport lounges
MGM is applying for a casino license in Abu Dhabi
Gate lice are everywhere