Quick take
- The Plaza, the New York hotel from Home Alone 2, takes its last guests on January 19, 2027, and closes for at least four years to restore its landmark facade.
- The city says nothing on its end requires the hotel to close. The operator decided running a hotel inside a four-year construction job wasn’t worth it.
- Why it matters now: Every business with a famous “front door” eventually faces the Plaza’s choice. Patch it while you stay open, or go dark and fix it once.
If you grew up in the ’90s, you know the scene. Kevin McCallister walks into the Plaza with his dad’s credit card, checks himself into a suite, orders a mountain of ice cream from room service and gets the side-eye from Tim Curry at the front desk.
That lobby is about to go quiet. On October 14, Fairmont, which runs the hotel, announced the Plaza will close in January for at least four years to repair its 119-year-old facade. The Palm Court restaurant and the event rooms close too, according to Hotel Dive, citing The New York Times. The earliest it could reopen is 2031.
First, about that pool
Plenty of people remember Kevin cannonballing into the Plaza’s pool. Here’s the thing: the Plaza doesn’t have a pool. According to IMDb’s trivia for the film, the pool scene was shot at the Four Seasons in Chicago. The lobby is the real Plaza. The swim is Chicago.
That doesn’t hurt the Plaza one bit. Nobody checks in for the pool. They check in for the feeling, and the hotel knows it. For the movie’s 25th anniversary, it sold a “Home Alone 2” package starting at $895, with an in-room sundae bar, a limo ride for pizza, passes to the Empire State Building and Wollman Rink, and a Home Alone backpack. It ran from December 2017 to October 2018. A 1992 movie was still selling rooms 25 years later.
The numbers behind a 119-year-old icon
The Plaza opened in 1907 and cost $12.5 million to build. From 2005 to 2008, it closed for a $450 million lobby-to-roof restoration. In 2018, Qatar’s state-owned Katara Hospitality bought it for about $600 million.
Do the math on that last one: $600 million divided by $12.5 million is 48. The building sold for 48 times what it cost to build, before adjusting for a century of inflation.
Now the cost side. Four years is 4 × 365 nights, plus one leap day in 2028. That’s 1,461 nights with no room revenue, no Palm Court tea, no ballroom weddings and no galas. The owner hasn’t said what the restoration will cost or how it’s being paid for.
The city didn’t make them close
This is the part most people miss. The Department of Buildings said its latest inspection found the Plaza’s facade unsafe and required a sidewalk shed. But the department also told CBS New York there’s “nothing on the city’s end” that would stop the hotel from staying open during repairs.
So closing was a choice. Fairmont’s statement pointed to the “significant intrusion to operations” the work would cause. Picture paying luxury rates to sleep behind four years of scaffolding and jackhammers. And because the Plaza is a city landmark and a National Historic Landmark, the facade has to be restored, not just patched, under historic preservation rules. That’s slow, careful work.
The Plaza has been dark before. Beyond the 2005 restoration, it closed for more than a year during the pandemic in 2020. Both times, it came back.
What happens to the people
The Hotel & Gaming Trades Council says 378 union employees will have the right to return to their jobs at the same pay when the hotel reopens, and the union will help them find other work in the meantime. The building’s 181 condo owners are a bigger question mark. It’s still unclear whether they’ll have to move out during the work.
Then there are the brides. Anyone with a Plaza wedding booked after January 19 has to find a new venue. The notice: October 14 to January 19 is 97 days, or about 14 weeks. In the New York wedding business, that’s not much time.
The lesson for owners
Most businesses don’t have a landmark facade. But most have a version of one: the storefront, the website, the flagship product, the thing customers see first. And at some point it needs more than a patch.
The Plaza’s bet is that a brand built over 119 years, with a movie still selling rooms decades later, can survive four years offline better than it can survive four years of looking worse. It’s betting its nostalgia keeps. Its track record, back from a three-year restoration and a pandemic shutdown, says it might.
Before Your Next Meeting
- Name your facade. What’s the first thing customers see, and when was it last fixed properly instead of patched?
- Price the two options. Compare the cost of a big fix done all at once against the cost of operating at a worse experience for the same stretch of time.
- Keep your people. If you have to pause something, decide early how you’ll bring your best people back. The Plaza’s workers know their jobs and pay are waiting.
- Give customers more runway than you think. Fourteen weeks is short for anyone planning a big event. The earlier they hear it from you, the more they trust you.
- Know what your nostalgia is worth. If customers have a memory tied to your brand, that’s an asset. The Plaza sold it for $895 a night.
Sources: CBS New York; Hotel Dive; NY1; 6sqft; The Real Deal; CBS Philadelphia on the Home Alone 2 package; IMDb trivia for Home Alone 2; Wikipedia. Featured photo: Jen Dries on Unsplash.
