By Julia Reed | June/July 2009 | 

A Magic Hotel

New Orleans’ iconic Roosevelt Hotel restores its name, its glamour, and its reputation

It tells you pretty much everything you need to know about New Orleans that although out-of-towners bought the Roosevelt Hotel and rechristened it the Fairmont in 1965, the locals—to this day—steadfastly refuse to call it that. New Orleans is a city of ritual and habit, and when they are even slightly tampered with, it stirs up deep-dyed fears that what’s left of the centuries-old fabric of the city will not hold, that it will become just like everywhere else: a place without Mardi Gras or second-line parades or Friday lunches that last all afternoon.

In this case, the forebodings were not misplaced. First opened in 1893 as the Grunewald, and renamed for the twenty-sixth president in 1923, the Roosevelt had been a fourteen-story shrine to ritual.

Generations paid the obligatory Christmas visit to the lavish grand lobby (it runs the entire block through the hotel, from University Place to Baronne Street) and imbibed countless Sazeracs or Ramos Gin Fizzes in front of the stunning art deco murals behind the Sazerac Bar (during Prohibition Henry Ramos sold his recipe and the rights to his name to the hotel). They listened to Peggy Lee and Ray Charles sing in the Blue Room and danced to the likes of the Dorsey Brothers and Glenn Miller, whose music was broadcast live from the hotel by local radio station WWL. By 1965, the Roosevelt was so storied it served as the inspiration for Arthur Hailey’s own best-selling story—the novel Hotel, which came out the same year.

But when Hurricane Katrina damaged the hotel in 2005, the Fairmont had already deteriorated into little more than a tawdry reminder of what the Roosevelt used to be. While my own husband romanced me to the strains of Sullivan Dabney’s orchestra in the Palm Court, one of the few public rooms still open when I arrived in the 1990s, there was little other action; the lobby was worn and depressing, the hopelessly outdated rooms mostly filled with tour groups. The hotel shut down indefinitely after the storm, but developers bought it two years later for $17 million and spent another $145 million bringing it up to the standards of the Waldorf Astoria Collection, to which it now belongs. They also had the good sense to officially rename it the Roosevelt.