11 Hotels to Visit in Your Dreams

The Carlyle Hotel, New York, New York

To get my mother to move to the suburbs from a duplex overlooking Central Park when I was in middle school, my father, who could no longer bear the grueling early morning ritual necessitated by alternate side of the street parking, made a deal: They would spend a weekend each month in a suite at the Carlyle. From the doorway of their bedroom, I’d watch as she readied herself to leave: beige cashmere, pearls, scarlet lipstick, a spritz of Arpège. I had only visited the hotel once, as a child, for lunch with an aunt at Bemelmans Bar, where I fixated on a particularly jaunty male rabbit in the famed murals based on Ludwig Bemelmans’s “Madeleine” book series. Like my father, this character wore a blazer and smoked. In the late 1970s, once I had moved back to the city for college, the Carlyle became my inside joke: I took my punky entourage for drinks, all of us in black leather. There were frosty glances as our Doc Martins clomped through the polished black marble lobby, with its marigold mohair sofas, but I’d flash an unthreatening smile and, as my father had taught me, press a folded $20 into the palm of the door guy. In a photo from those days, I’m sitting in a tufted banquette below a Bemelmans giraffe with my Billy Idol-ish boyfriend — Ben? Ted? — my dyed and permed mohawk the color of my white Russian. I remember telling him that JFK and Jackie kept a suite there during Camelot; in response, he belched so loudly that the helmet-haired lady next to us said, “Please!” As an adult, I can blend into the Carlyle crowd, though I’ll always feel like a bit of an impostor, never native to its effortless chic. Still, it’s where, for decades, I’ve told out-of-towners to meet me for a drink, knowing that cocktails there will stay with them. Since Covid, I sometimes walk there, for exercise, from my apartment downtown. Standing under the awning, I imagine my parents, now long gone, at the Café Carlyle listening to Bobby Short play Cole Porter, then grabbing a nightcap at the bar. One day soon, I remind myself, I’ll be back. — NANCY HASS, writer at large, T Magazine