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Tales of Gotham, Or No Room at the Inn Wall Street arbitrageurIvan Boesky wanted his very own New York hotel. So Ivan took a look at the long-shuttered Gotham, at Fifth and 55th, and offered its new owners $10 million more than they'd agreed to buy it for earlier this month. Jack Pratt of the Pratt Hotel Corp. told Ivan "absolutely not. It's a prime Manhattan location that we're going to make a `Maxim's de Paris Suite Hotel' with $80 million in renovations." Pratt Hotels, with exclusive U.S. rights to Pierre Cardin's Maxim's de Paris name for luxury hotels, and Southmark Corp. recently teamed with New Yorkers William Zeckendorf, Arthur G. Cohen and Sol Goldman to buy the troubled Gotham. The group says it will undo some of the $120 million in renovations carried out the past five years by Swiss Hotel entrepeneur Rene Hatt before he went bankrupt in the process. "Hatt was making the place over to the liking of sheiks and Arabs," said Pratt. "We'll tear out the red lava, put in marble, and enclose the bathtubs." Enclose the bathtubs? "The bathtubs were right in the bedrooms. We don't think that's to American businessmen's liking." Boesky, a successful takeover speculator whose personal worth is about $200 million, knows a thing or two about the hotel biz. He and his wife, Seema, are the principal stockholders in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and...