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Witness the revival of an old mixed-use hybrid-but one with plenty of new challenges.
When the Glenn Miller Orchestra struck up its signature tune Pennsylvania 6-5000 at New York City's Hotel Pennsylvania during the sultry summer of 1940, most people in the audience knew that the song's name was also the hotel's phone number. But the title was actually a whole lot more personal than that: It was also the phone number of Miller himself, as well as that of his brass and string sections-because the band members didn't just play the hotel, they lived there, with their families, full time.
Today, the notion of taking up residence inside a hotel seems lost to Miller's era; somewhere along the line, hotel living went the way of tube radios and Packards. Yet recent years have witnessed a resurgence of the idea-either in the form of renovations or new developments-this time within a mixed-use model. From New York City's Trump International hotel and Tower by Costas Kondylis and Partners with Philip Johnson (1997) to the imperious new Intercontinental Boston Hotel and Residences designed by Elkus/Manfredi Architects (set to open in 2006), it's increasingly clear that the wealthy are, once again, choosing the concierge desk as their new front stoop.
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That's been true on the eastern seaboard, at any rate, and in Chicago too, where the Park Hyatt by architect Lucien Lagrange has hosted condominium residents on its upper floors since opening in 2000. Now, however, a number of high-profile developments on the West Coast have clearly signaled residential/hotel mixed-use as a phenomenon with national implications, which has given a number of design firms an early and vigorous education about the demands and vagaries of this retro breed of housing stock.
"The Pierre and the Waldorf had this model in Manhattan 60 or 70 years ago, but it didn't hit the West Coast until recently," observes Mark Hornberger, principal with the San Francisco-based firm of Hornberger+Worstell, which recently completed the 32-story Omni San Diego, boasting 500 hotel suites and 37 condominium units in a mixeduse melange that thematically links internal amenities like party suites with external ramp access to a new sports arena. And...