Perfectly Preserved, Yet Gone

Trips, at least mine, have their major and minor goals. More than 23 years ago, a native New Yorker I knew suggested I visit the Cloisters, a re-created Old World monastery that also houses part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval collection. I thought that sounded like a good idea. It’s remote by Manhattan standards, up on the northwest corner of the island at a place called Fort Tryon Park. If you visit the Met, it’s no extra charge to see the Cloisters during the same day.

In the years since, I’d never made there. I seriously considered going this time, even planned to. But after wandering around the Met for about three hours, I decided I needed to go into the open air of Flushing Meadows Park instead of the Cloisters, so I still haven’t acted on my friend’s suggestion. So much for that minor goal.

Another minor goal of this trip, seeing the Starlight Roof, was considerably easier, since it was part of my conference hotel. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Starlight Roof was one of Manhattan’s top nightclubs, perched on one of the roofs of the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Ave. I discovered where it was last year, too late to seek out the room, which had been restored to its art deco glory not too many years before. This year I found the right elevator in the hotel and rode up to see it.

From a review of a 1951 Xavier Cugot show at the Starlight Roof, republished in bigbandsandbignames.com: “In many ways, the Starlight Roof is the Waldorf's most glamorous public room, with its tremendous grill-like ceiling with large sky-blue stars and myriad small ones blinking a constant welcome.”

Oh, man. The reviewer also heard the clank of glasses, smelled thick tobacco smoke, and saw Cugot and his band at close quarters. The place must have been alive. Compared to that moment, the Starlight Roof I saw was as animated as a stuffed moosehead. It’s a pretty room, certainly, and the grill-like ceiling has been restored to its original self after being Eisenhowered sometime after the Cugot show. I saw no sky-blue stars, but maybe they still come out when the room is dark.

This pretty much captures the Starlight Roof as it is in the 2000s, from the hotel’s web site: “Providing a dramatic backdrop for award presentations, stockholders' meetings and annual conferences, the Starlight Roof is synonymous with success. An unmatched array of technological accoutrements and world-class meeting professionals assure that every event is as triumphant as the impression it conveys.”

Ho-hum. As far as I could see, there was nothing – no artfully hung photos of big names at the Starlight, no tasteful plaques, nothing – to acknowledge that the room was once a high-class jazz joint. Now it’s just a posh place to put people to sleep, rather than to keep them awake.