The Barbizon is full of fantastic detail, from Grace Kelly scandalizing other guests by dancing topless in the hallway to the litany of men who claimed to have sneaked past the front desk. Bren argues that what first attracted women to the hotel is what ultimately shut it down: freedom. In Bren’s telling, some of the same forces that brought them to Manhattan led to the end of the Barbizon as they knew it-and to the New York City that we know today. More than a biography of a building, the book is an absorbing history of labor and women’s rights in one of the country’s largest cities, and also of the places that those women left behind to chase their dreams. The historian Paulina Bren, in her new book, The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster), chronicles the experiences of these women, and of some of the hundreds of thousands of others like them, who stayed in the hotel. And in this captivating portrait, the hotel comes alive again as an enchanted site of a bygone era, 'a place of glamour, desire, and young female ambition.' Read Full Review > But one of the book’s more intriguing side stories concerns the hotel’s long-haulers, dubbed 'The Women'. Bren occasionally wanders too far into tangential material. In considering the repercussions of Prohibition, the Depression and McCarthyism on American women, Ms. Bren convincingly argues that the histories of both shed light on the history of women in 20th-century America. Two institutions helped shape the Barbizon’s legacy: the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School.and Mademoiselle magazine. Bren’s juicy sociocultural history glitters with the names and stories of talented, beautiful young women who passed through the Barbizon’s Italianate atrium lobby on their way to literary and cinematic stardom.

But as Paulina Bren’s beguiling new book makes clear, its place in the city’s storied past is no less deserving.

Among the handful of iconic hotels closely entwined with New York’s cultural history, the Barbizon is perhaps less widely known than the Plaza, Algonquin or Waldorf Astoria.

The barbizon hotel book