@travelwithnoon: For more than fifty years there was a hotel in New York where no man was allowed above the lobby. It sounds like a cage. It was the only way a woman could get into the city at all. Until the 1960s a woman travelling alone in America was often simply turned away. No room, no table, not without a man beside her. So in 1927 the Barbizon opened on East 63rd Street. Seven hundred rooms, women only. Getting in was harder than getting a job. Three letters of reference, and a woman at the front desk who graded you. An A if you were under twenty eight. A B up to thirty eight. A C meant you were over the hill. If she let you in, you were expected to be out every morning looking for work. At night they swapped the male elevator operators for women, so nobody male went up in that building after dark. Mademoiselle magazine put its guest editors here, which means Joan Didion slept in this building. So did Sylvia Plath, who on her last night carried her suitcase up to the roof and threw her clothes off it out over Manhattan, and had to borrow something to travel home in the next morning. In 1947 an eighteen year old drama student moved in and took modelling work to pay for her classes and her room. Her name was Grace Kelly. In February 1981 the Barbizon started taking men. In 2005 the developers gutted it for condominiums, and seven hundred rooms became sixty six apartments. It did not close because it failed. It closed because women stopped needing it. Share this with the friend who would have been thrown out in a week. Follow for the untold stories behind the world's most iconic places, and save this for your next trip to New York. #TheBarbizon #NYCHistory #GraceKelly #HotelHistory #hiddenhistory

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Thursday 06 August 2026 20:53:11 GMT