Carlyle Hotel

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The Carlyle Hotel is a luxury hotel located at 35 East 76th Street in the Upper East Side area of New York City. The hotel, designed in Art Deco style and named after Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, was built by Moses Ginsberg, maternal grandfather of Rona Jaffe. The hotel was opened in 1931, the year Jaffe was born.

A cooperative with 180 rental units and 60 privately-owned suites, it became a Manhattan trophy asset and one of the fifteen hotels owned by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts in 2001. The Carlyle was designed by architects Bien & Prince and originally opened as a residential hotel.

The hotel's Café Carlyle has featured a number of well-known jazz performers - notably George Feyer from 1955-1968, and Bobby Short from 1968-2004. Woody Allen and his jazz band have been playing weekly at the café since 1996. Other artists who have performed at the Cafe Carlyle include Elaine Stritch, Judy Collins, Barbara Cook, Eartha Kitt, John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey, Beverly Peer, and Ute Lemper. Steve Tyrell has been the featured performer in December through New Year's Eve for several years.

The Cafe Carlyle is noted for the murals by Marcel Vertes, which were cleaned in the summer of 2007 as part of a renovation that included raising the ceiling of the intimate space by two feet. In its Bemelmans Bar, the hotel features a mural entitled "Central Park", the only surviving publicly accessible artwork by Ludwig Bemelmans, the author of the Madeline children's books.

The Carlyle Restaurant, formerly Dumonet at the Carlyle, is open seven days a week for three meals (including a Sunday brunch).

The hotel is particularly identified with President John F. Kennedy, who owned an apartment on the 34th floor for the ten years prior to his death. He stayed at the apartment in a well-publicized visit for a few days just prior to his inauguration in January 1961. Presidents Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan also stayed at the Carlyle while in office.

The hotel is also the source of the name for the Carlyle Group, as it was the location where that firm's founders first met in the mid-1980s.

The Council for United Civil Rights Leadership (CUCRL) was setup in a meeting held at the Carlyle Hotel. Malcolm X expresses his concerns with having a white man in charge of this new fundraising organisation during his 10 November 1963 speech Message to the Grassroots. He describes the hotel (rather than just one suite) as being owned by the Kennedy family.

Message to the Grassroots