The Blue Room, which first opened on New Year’s Eve 1935, has been painted an even deeper blue and will once again feature live music, as will the Sazerac Bar, whose stunning murals were saved from Katrina’s ravages by former Fairmont director of engineering Jeff Dennison, who is the new Roosevelt director of historic restoration and engineering. The Sazerac restaurant will bring back such grand hotel dining signatures as Caesar salad made tableside, while noted local chef John Besh (of Iron Chef and Restaurant August fame) will open Domenica, an Italian restaurant using local ingredients.

The grandest of its refurbished suites—named for Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong, and Huey Long—have butlers and bay windows. They recall the era when Long took up residence in a twelfth-floor suite and built the eighty-mile Airline Highway to Baton Rouge as an almost door-to-door link between the hotel and the state capitol. The hope is that with the name restored, the magic of that era might also be: There was always the feeling, says Times-Picayune columnist Angus Lind, “that those who walked in were about to encounter an adventure.”

The walking-in part is already better. The sagging awning at the main entrance has been replaced by a gleaming brass canopy, and the tacky carpet in the reception area has been pulled up to reveal ornate hexagonal tile from the 1920s. The enormous chandeliers have been refurbished, and a Waldorf signature, a lobby clock, has been added. Lest paranoid locals fear outside tradition creeping in, this one, shown at the 1867 Paris exhibitions, was purchased from French Quarter antiques dealer M.S. Rau and features a ten-foot-tall bronze of a robed woman holding a rotating scepter—thereby making not only a reference to the city’s French ancestry but to its long tradition of similarly robed and sceptered Mardi Gras queens. It bodes well for future adventures.