Talk:Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

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1 POV?
2 Who's Waldorf?
3 Naming and Punctuation
4 Restrooms
5 Relevance of the Boldt Family History

[edit] POV?

The first sentence begins "A wealthy sybarites' paradise." Maybe it is, but "sybarite" has a negative connotation - it is a person devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, and is synonymous with "hedonist" - and I don't think its association with such people needs to be mentioned in these terms or in the first sentence of the article. Opinions? — Dan | Talk 01:06, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

A rhetorical flourish that adds no info and sounds like marketing copy anyway - lose it! Stan 02:08, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

well, it's become "socialite" now...saturnight 20:37, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Who's Waldorf?

Someone or something called "Waldorf" got its name before the Astor's. The Astors do have an article. I'd like to read about Waldorf. -DePiep 09:05, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry, the article is clear about this. I rest my question. -DePiep 09:10, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Naming and Punctuation

The official rendering of the hotel's name is actually Waldorf=Astoria, with an equal sign in place of a dash. The URL www.waldorfastoria.com redirects to a Hilton portal for the Waldorf=Astoria and Waldorf Towers.

I don't think Wikipedia allows pages to contain an equals sign in their title. I created the page with the name "Waldorf-Astoria hotel" because that's how it appeared on the Wikipedia:Requested articles page. Do you think the page should be re-named to "Waldorf Astoria hotel"?

Acegikmo1 17:21, Mar 20, 2004 (UTC)

I'd call the hyphen correct. Though it looks just like an equals, I think that it's just the way hyphens are rendered in that font and not intended to be an equal sign. -- Djinn112 01:57, Mar 21, 2004 (UTC)

Hmmmm. Wasn't aware of that limitation. I think the title should stay as is; I've done some Web searches, and most of the time, the hotel name is rendered with a dash, even though not technically correct. I'll make the page a little more clear in that respect.

Dale Arnett 18:05, Mar 20, 2004 (UTC)

Just to be clear: it IS an equals sign, not a double hyphen. Even in the FAQ linked at the current bottom of this page, the hotel uses an equals. —Frungi 07:14, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

According to the Manual of Style, this article should be at Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks). I am mainly referring to this section:

(proposed) Likewise, avoid using special characters that are not pronounced and are included purely for decoration. In the article about a trademark, it is acceptable to use decorative characters the first time the trademark appears, but thereafter, an alternative that follows the standard rules of punctuation should be used:

--/ɛvɪs/ /tɑːk/ /kɑntɹɪbjuʃənz/ 22:25, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Support. — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:29, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
Oppose weakly. The first time it appears is in the page title.--Henrygb 09:46, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
Oppose (sorry, I was out of town at the time this took place) - the correct name should be used. — Dan | Talk 22:38, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Support. Due to technical restrictions, many special characters are unusable for article titles (See Wikipedia:Naming Conventions). The "equals sign" used here is not the "double hyphen" specified, so I don't see why we should insist upon a visual approximation (rather than the syntactically approximate single hyphen) in the title. The article's text is quite adequate to the task of informing the reader of the hotel's typographic quirks. Dystopos 22:01, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

The official name is Waldorf=Astoria and that has nothing to do with font. The article-name can stay the same, but at least use the correct name in the article please. Look at this page for the ppl who don't believe it. — ēmpoor! 15:51, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Quote from the above site: The corridor built to connect the two buildings became an enduring symbol of the combined Waldorf and Astoria hotels - it is represented by the "=" in The Waldorf=Astoria. — ēmpoor! 15:53, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

I'd like to see the quote told in the article. -DePiep 12:47, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm not convinced the = is part of the legal name. I believe the = is part of the logo and that the = is a convention that the hotel uses. If you check with the US Trademark Office, the trademark is for "Waldorf-Astoria" and a typed logo. There's no TM with an equals sign. [1] It's not unusual for companies to claim that their name is something different from their legal name. Lots of companies put capital letters in the middle of works, for example. I know I did this when I worked in marketing for some companies -- it's not illegal, because you aren't setting out to commit fraud and you're just "doing business as". --Westendgirl 06:44, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Similarly, the FedEx logo "officially" contains a forward-pointing arrow in it's design. That does not mean we need to approximate it by using "FedE→x" in our article. --Dystopos 14:41, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I thought that was just an unintentional illusion created by the white space between the letters Ex? By that logic, you could also say it officially contains a spoon in the lower half of the first e. —Frungi 08:34, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

It was not unintentional. The designer, Lindon Leader, says this in an interview: "Once I decided to refine the concept of the embedded arrow, I found that, to make the arrow more legitimate and identifiable, one needed to actually reconstruct the letterforms in order to make the arrow happen." [2]. You can see how the arrow was incorporated into the Arabic version of the logo here. --Dystopos 14:24, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Oops... I moved this page of my own accord before reading the talk page to see if it had even been discussed before.. sorry to anyone who thinks I jumped the gun :) Anyway - now having read the discussion, yes I do still think that the equals sign should be used, since Wikipedia articles' titles do allow it, and it is how the hotel prefers to title itself. It doesn't matter what their "legal name" is in any corporate registry; this titling is how the hotel wishes to be called. If you used that legal name argument, then you would have to re-title all articles about notable people to include their full, exact legal names as per their passports, ignoring any variations by which they are popularly known. EuroSong 01:21, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Your reasoning should not outweigh the reasoning of other editors. Please restore the page pending the revised consensus that will, no doubt, follow your argument. --Dystopos 21:40, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Restrooms

Just about the cleanest public restrooms in the United States.

"Rest"rooms? You mean rooms where people go for a rest? :P

Or do you just mean toilets... hehe. EuroSong ^talk 22:19, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Relevance of the Boldt Family History

In the third paragraph of the history section, there is a rather lengthy digression about the descendents of George Boldt, the first manager-host of the Waldorf. A Philadelphia family of hoteliers well into the twentieth century, the Boldts owned or managed the Bellevue Stratford on Broad Street in Philadelphia, but, other than George Boldt, none of them had anything to do with the Waldorf-Astoria. I think this material, while interesting (I guess), is best deleted from this article. It strikes me as clearly irrelevant. Do you agree? PeterHuntington 20:50, 26 February 2007 (UTC)